The first thing to understand in any discussion of Buddhism is to realize that it’s a product of India, and that at the basis of the whole Indian view of life there is a fundamental idea, of which Buddhism is a correction. Buddhism is a way of reforming Hinduism, making it more effective—and incidentally, making Hinduism available for export. Hinduism is not simply a religion, it’s a total way of life. And, in a way, Hinduism is as much attached to the soil of India as Shinto is to Japan. Very difficult to be a complete Hindu outside India because it involves the social structure, the diet, every conceivable detail of everyday life. And since you can’t live that outside India, the essentials of this way of life have somehow to be stripped for export. And that’s what Buddhism is. Buddhism spreading all over Asia is, in a way, the transmission of Hinduism to the world, and Buddhism could be said to be India’s greatest contribution to civilization.

Through Buddhism, India has very, very thoroughly civilized the Far East in a way that one can speak of civilization before the possibilities of scientific technology. In other words, the Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist civilization of the Far East in, say, 1500 AD was the most sophisticated, clean, progressive form of human civilization on Earth. And when Europeans from Venice, Genoa, Paris, so on, visited China at that time, they were overwhelmed. They could hardly believe that such high peaks of civilization could be reached.

Everything, of course, changed in the middle of the nineteenth century when the Industrial Revolution completely transformed everyday life in the West. And it not only transformed our housing, our clothes, our food, but it also transformed our ideas about humanity and justice. We abolished slavery, we abolished judicial torture—all sorts of barbarities disappeared from the West at that time and not before.

And so Westerners living, say, in 1500 or even 1600, were astounded at the height of civilization in Asia. And to a very, very large degree—not entirely, but to a large degree—the migration of Buddhism was responsible for this. Because it is a profoundly humane philosophy with a conception of the universe that you could say was wonderfully suited to reasonable people.

You see, in the United States we live under a republic, and we consider that a republican form of government is the best form. Because there is no authority except the people—at least in theory. That’s what we strive for. Now, the people, of course, is not a very reliable authority because it’s full of stupid people. But de Tocqueville once said that a democracy is always right, but for the wrong reasons. And the reason for this is quite simple: that the people as a whole consists of a vast variety of different temperaments, different levels of intelligence. And by gambling on the people—and that is to say, by the people making an act of trust in itself—you have a far sounder basis for social order than trust in an authority, however clever. Because we do not know what kinds of cleverness are going to be needed in any future eventuality.

For example, when a civilization is developing new territory, as the West of the United States was colonized a hundred years ago, what was necessary then were very strong individualistic types: ornery, aggressive, fighting kinds of people. But when you change to an industrial civilization where we live together in enormous groups, what we need are cooperative people who can work in teams, not so aggressive. But we don’t know what new shifts in our circumstances are going to require what kind of people. So for this reason the trust of the people in the people is the best bet.

And the Chinese have the same view, because they feel that human nature—in both its selfish and its altruistic aspects, both in its reason and in its passions—is something to be trusted. That if you can’t do that, you can’t do anything. Because if you don’t trust human nature, and if you say that human beings are basically evil or stupid, and they therefore need an authority to control them, you leave out of consideration the fact that you, yourself, are really the foundation of the authority that you think ought to control you. For example, when a fundamentalist Christian says that he believes in the Bible, and that the Bible is to be believed because the Bible says it’s to be believed, he himself is at the root of this act of faith. It isn’t the Bible he believes in, it’s himself. Only: he conceals this from himself by believing in the Bible. So if you say, “I’m a devout Catholic and I believe what the Pope says,” you are at the basis of the authority of the Pope, because you give a scent to it. But you always conceal this from yourself by saying, “Oh no, it’s not my will, but it’s the will of God, it’s the will of the Pope, it is something,” but you give a scent to it.

Now so, in the West we have grown up under many centuries with an authoritarian view of the universe: a conception of the world as a monarchical form of government. And as citizens of the United States you cannot consistently subscribe to that. Because if you say that a republican form of government is the best form, you cannot assent to a monarchical theory of the universe—unless you want to make the Lord God a constitutional monarch, like the Queen of England, who simply is a stabilizing figurehead for a process of social order, remaining a constant which, however, very seldom (if ever) uses any power.

Now, Buddhism is often described as a form of atheism because it has no theory of divine government of the universe. And likewise, Hinduism before it does not have a theory of divine government of the universe, because the Hindu image of God is not based on a monarchical model. The Hindus indeed have a theology, they do have an idea of God. It’s a triple idea of God, you might say. It is polytheistic, monotheistic, and panentheistic. I have to describe each of these terms.

The polytheism of Hinduism is that, of course, that it has an array of gods. But every Hindu knows that all the many gods—whether it is Indra, Śiva, Viṣṇu, Gaṇeś, whatever the name—all are aspects of one. And so no Hindu takes polytheism literally or seriously. They are simply different functions, different expressions in a hierarchical order of the one. But then, when we get back to the one, there are two levels of the one, and they’re called respectively saguna and nirguna—the word guna meaning “having quality” or “attribute.” So there is the Brahman (the godhead) saguna with attributes, and there is the Brahman nirguna without attributes about which nothing can be thought and which nothing can be said, except what it is not.

So, in a way, the saguna Brahman is a monotheistic god, sometimes called Īśvara, the lord. But when the Hindu uses the word “the Lord,” that is an English translation of bhagavan. And that doesn’t quite have the same meaning as “Lord,” which political authority has in our Western world. But we shouldn’t really use the word “Lord” to translate bhagavan, because the monotheistic god in Hindu philosophy does not rule the world. Instead, it or he acts the world as a player in the theater acts a part. The basic Hindu image of the universe is dramatic, wherein every being whatsoever—the Buddhist phrase all sentient beings, which includes even the grains of dust—they are all parts being played by the one actor. This is the Hindu view.

Now, what of the actor? You see, what can be said of the actor? What can be known of the one that plays all this? Obviously nothing. Not because there is no fundamental principle underlying the universe, but because it would not be self-defining. Just, for example, as the color of the lens of your eye is no color at all—we call it transparency—and yet it is the basis of every variety of sight. It has to be colorless to provide that basis, just in the same way as you want white paper to be the basis of the painting with many colors and many shapes on it—the paper itself must be blank. But yet, the basis, the paper, is an absolutely essential prerequisite for there being any painting at all. So, in the same way, the diaphragm of the speaker in the radio is itself neutral. It vibrates in such a way that you hear an enormous variety of sounds on it, but it doesn’t vibrate itself. It doesn’t convey itself as part of the message. And, in the same way, the structure of the radio, the transistors, the wiring, they don’t get in the way of the message. It doesn’t, when it comes on in the morning, explain itself by saying, “I am a set of transistors, and I am wired thus and so,” and so on and so forth. Nothing is said about that, because that would get in the way. That would be like having some defect in your eye which made you see spots on the sky because of a defect in the retina. Then you would be seeing your eye, and your eye would be getting in the way of sight.

So the Hindu view of the nirguna Brahman—which is the root and ground of being—that that eternal, indestructible, always is reality, is you at the very deepest level of your own existence, and that the feeling that you are not that, that you are a temporary role that is being played—an ego, a mortal organism—is called māyā, which has many, many meanings, one of which is “illusion.” Not illusion, though, in exactly a bad sense, but illusion connected with our own Latin root of the word illusion, which is from the Latin ludere, meaning “to play.” Illusion, māyā, also means “skill,” “art,” “creative power,” and “magic.” So that the Hindu sees the whole world of ordinary everyday life as an illusion, as it were, superimposed upon the void. But this void is not blank void, not nothing in the literal sense, but the nirguna Brahman. And that is you.

So the basic assumption here is that in life there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. You can experience fears, but they are like the fears you experience when you go to the theater or the movies. The fear that this thing will all end up bad, or—you know, you get involved in the drama. And so they would say that all your natural fears about everyday life are simply that you’ve been carried away by the skill with which you yourself are acting this game. So that every Hindu therefore aspires to the state of mokṣa, meaning “liberation.” It’s exactly the same meaning as the word nirvāṇa in Buddhism, although they have different emphasis. Mokṣa, to be a mukta (a liberated person who has attained the state of mokṣa) is to be free. Nirvāṇa in Buddhism means “blown out,” as when you exhale and don’t cling to your breath; you let your breath go. Well, the same idea: it’s to let go, and not in any state of anxiety cling to your own existence. So you are free in either state of the power of the illusion to convince you that your particular physical organism, that your particular feeling of ego, is a final reality. That you will simply lose when you die, and then thereafter be nothing or be involved in some other kind of rat race. So Hinduism is in a way saying to everybody: “Courage, my friends! You’re it. Don’t pretend you’re not.”

Now then, Buddhism comes on top of Hinduism to make an interesting transition. In a way, a Hindu is still a believer. That is to say, he subscribes to an idea, to a theory of the universe. And this theory asserts that you yourself are it—or in Sanskrit: tát tvam ási, “that thou art.” The Buddhist criticizes this by saying, “If you have to believe in this as a theory, you are still using a prop, and this is getting in the way of the fullest possible realization of the truth.” So the Buddha taught no theory. And the Hindu, you see, has the doctrine that the Ātman—which means in Sanskrit the self—yourself, the Ātman, is Brahman; nirguna. Brahman, the eternal (as Tillich would say) ground of being.

The Buddha denied the doctrine of the Ātman. He said the nature of reality is anātman (which means “without self”), anitya (“without permanence”), and, so long as you cling to it, duḥkha (which means “suffering” or “frustration”). He did this because no amount of verbal denial or doctrinal denial will alter in any way what is reality. But all it did was to destroy the conceptions which human beings form of themselves and of the nature of reality, using those conceptions to defend themselves in one way or another against change, against impermanence, against the fact that everything is flowing away.

Now so long as, in any way—economically, politically, religiously—you are trying to defend yourself against life, you’re obviously still under the power of māyā. But when you give up all defenses, then you discover—not as a theory, but as a vivid and immediate experience—who you really are or what you really are. But so long as you’re defending, you can’t do it because you’re still under the bewitchment of the terror.

That if—I remember a funny story Joseph Campbell told me once. He was talking with a Hindu swami, and the Hindu swami was saying, oh he said, “I think that the doctrine of reincarnation is so great. That we are born again and again in this progressive thing that we develop spiritually.” He said, “I really think that that’s a—I couldn’t really face life without that belief.” And Joseph said to him, “Swami, you’re talking nonsense. You’re supposed to be on the way to liberation, which is to be free from reincarnations. And yet you are clinging to the idea of reincarnation for your salvation.” And the swami suddenly jumped up and said, “My goodness, yes! You talk just like a Hindu.” You know? And he suddenly jumped out of it; came off it.

So then, this very simple principle is at the basis of what all forms of Buddhism are about. That, if you have the nerve—and basically all this is a matter of nerve—you can live the liberated life because all terrors are empty. They’re all noises in the air. And indeed, all existence is, in a way, just so much to do; much ado about nothing. And this is not said in a joyless way. I played you those chants. The first chant that you heard is for protection against evil spirits, and it doesn’t mean anything at all. It is a Japanese pronunciation of a Chinese translation of Sanskrit. And all this Sanskrit never did mean anything. It is just magical sounds, what they call mantra. And in this way it says: this universe is a performance.

Now words, of course, have meaning. And I’m talking to you at the moment, and you more or less understand what I say. But now, let’s take the whole situation of your sitting here and listening to me talking. You’re understanding what I say. But what does the whole situation mean? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a form of life. It’s like a giraffe, a rhinoceros, a mountain, a eucalyptus tree. This is a human game. And we’re doing this jazz here, you see. And so it’s not threatening. It is just jazz, but good jazz.

Now, in Buddhism and in Hinduism there tend to be two points of view, just like Westerners are divided into optimists and pessimists. An optimist says this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist says this is the best of all possible worlds. So there is a tendency in certain kinds of Buddhism to say, really and truly, if you want to be absolutely free of the māyā, of the world illusion, you ought not to experience it anymore. You ought to go into a state of meditation called samādhi, in which your ordinary sensory consciousness is suspended. Nobody will say what kind of consciousness this is positively, because it has in it no specifics. It isn’t—it’s like the color of your head as seen by your eyes. It isn’t black, it isn’t white, is it? You don’t experience a dark area behind your eyes. You don’t either experience a light area. You experience something you can’t talk about at all. It is simply neither blank nor non-blank.

And so they would say that state is the highest. And that is a point of view that prevails among the Buddhists of southern Asia. The Buddhists of Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam are members of what is called the Theravada school that is also known as the Hinayana, or the “Little Course.” The word “yana” has a complex meaning. It means a “vehicle” or a “course.” It also has reference to the idea of a raft for getting from one shore of a river to another. So the Hinayana is a term used by the members of the Mahayana—it’s deprecatory—saying: this is the Little Course which can only carry a few people, and which is not really designed for mankind as a whole. And also it is preliminary. There is something that comes after realizing samādhi.

And here is how it works. You will first realize, in thinking about your own head, that it is completely colorless. Like the color of the eyes: the blank behind your eyes is necessary for you’re seeing anything at all or knowing anything at all. But the next step beyond that is to realize that all that you see around you is how it feels inside your head. That it is not just blank, but that the feeling and the state of the inside of your head is the totality of your sensations. And so this is exactly the point that the Mahayana kind of Buddhism makes over the Hinayana: that there is not a duality between reality and illusion, as if they were mutually exclusive. But that if you really understand illusion, it is the same as reality.

And so you would say that Mahayana is an invitation that, because there is nothing to be afraid of in the universe, get mixed up in it. Dig it. A great Zen Buddhist, R. H. Blyth, wrote to me years ago. He said, “How are you these days?” He said, “As for me, I have given up all kinds of satori and enlightenment, and I am becoming as deeply attached as I can get to as many people and as many things as possible.” Now, in other words, this is called attachment without being attached. This is known among the Hindus as niṣkāmakarma. Karma means “action,” “activity,” being involved in activity, being involved in the interlocking series of events which we call māyā, the everyday world. Nishkama means “without passion” or “unattached.” And the proper American translation of this is: “without hangups.” The common word used today, a hang-up, is an exact American equivalent for the Buddhist idea of attachment. It’s a beautifully exact equivalent. Or when we say a person is hung up on something or other, this means attached as the Buddhists use it. Another way of translating attachment is with the psychological term “blocking.” When you are phased or interrupted, non-plussed by a certain situation, you are blocked. And that is also another meaning of attachment.

So if the māyā—in other words, the come-on of the world—has a problem as something you have to deal with, something you have to survive in, something you have to worry about, if that blocks you, you see, then you are hung up. But if it doesn’t, then you can afford to get completely involved in it, and to be a full human being with emotions, with all the properties of which a human being is capable. And so in Mahayana Buddhism they say a person who has attained the way of enlightenment by the Theravada, who is in samādhi (which is blank), he is a stone Buddha because he has no feelings. Whereas, if you go beyond that through the Mahayana way, you are a living Buddha as distinct from a stone one. And you have feelings, you have thoughts, you are able to participate in the world, and you join in the games of human beings which want to construct this, improve that, do a life wherein we take other human beings seriously—no, sincerely, not seriously.

And the whole basis of Mahayana, it has two roots. One is called prajñā, with a tilde over the N; prajñā. That means the intuitive wisdom whereby you see through the illusion, and you know it’s all right, you know? You’re it. But let’s not put any name on it. They call it suchness. There’s about a vague a word you can get. In Sanskrit: tathatā. This is a da-da-da, you know? So prajñā is “to see through.” But this has to go hand in hand with karuṇā, meaning “compassion.” Because the person who understands prajñā, and who knows there’s nothing to be afraid of, has compassion for all those who don’t know it. They are involved in this. But his compassion is not pity. You pity a person when, in a way, you despise them; when you think that they are unfortunate. The spirit of compassion is this: when you see people who are involved in the illusion, you are not sorry for them and you don’t despise them, you’ll congratulate them on being so daring. In other words, the kind of person you might call today a square—kind of a terribly respectable citizen who isn’t relaxed and who, you know, is involved in the normal work of the world and has no imagination—is not someone to be despised. The Mahayana point of view is an object of compassion because he’s playing such a far-out game. He’s so involved in life that he doesn’t know where he started, you see? And so you necessarily respect a person in that situation.

And that is why in India the basic gesture of greeting, instead of shaking hands—which is: okay, we haven’t got any weapons here—the Hindu puts his hands together and bows like this. This is his greeting. Because he bows to you as the Godhead incarnate. You’re God coming on at me as Mr. So-and-so, Mrs. So-and-so, Ms. So-and-so, you see, and therefore I make a proper act of respect to you. And this is so vivid to the person who has realized this that you’re in a funny situation. You can’t really object to anyone. There’s no preaching to be done because you’re all Buddhas as you are, right sitting here around this room. And so I really have nothing to recommend to you. If you want to know that you’re Buddhas, then that’s your problem.

But then there is this delight in knowing it, you see; in suddenly being free from the world illusion, and at the same time free to be involved by it. I am free to get mad. I am free to be worried. I really don’t have to be. I don’t have to go on living. And yet I can feel free to feel compelled. You see? You sort of go under the thing at a deeper level. And in this understanding, life has a great deal more zest. You know, if you ever captured this feeling at all in any way, when suddenly you felt your body ceased to be a burden to you, and you say, “I’m walking on air.” That feeling of walking on air, of being able to go about everyday life with a certain non-protective attitude. You don’t have to defend yourself all the time, see? You don’t have to worry: are you making a good impression or not? Are you doing the right thing? You just go. Well, if you have that sense, you see, you can live with far greater artistry and skill than if you’re always worried about whether you’re creating the right impression.

So this attitude of prajñā (seeing through the game), karuṇā (compassion), these are the two foundations of Mahayana, and our characteristic of that type of being who is called a bodhisattva. And this word—although it originally meant a sort of junior Buddha, someone on the way to being a Buddha—has come in Mahayana to mean a person who is a Buddha, but has come back into the round of existence (which is called the saṃsāra: the rotation, the cycle, of birth and death), and is living so that you would not be able to distinguish him from an ordinary person. And this kind of being is idealized in Mahayana as being the real cat, the highest form of man. And it is for this reason that Mahayana has the ideal of the bodhisattva, the enlightened man returning to the world, that Mahayanaists have concerned themselves with culture. That is why they have had such a profound influence on the arts of the Far East and why they’re interested in the practical concerns of this world.

But remember, you see: when we look at them, we look at them from a post-industrial revolution situation and say, “But you are not very progressive. You sort of accept things as they are.” Well, nobody could do anything else before we had technology. We must never forget that we were in a worse situation than they were (from the standpoint of civilization) until the Industrial Revolution. Now they have technology. And the Japanese are going to create, and the Chinese are creating, a high technological civilization. And it remains to be seen what will happen if and when Mahayana Buddhism and technology get together.

Mahayana Buddhism was India’s principal export to the civilization of Asia. And that, quite basically, it’s an attitude to life based on complete non-fear—or you could call it not clinging to things. It’s based on the realization that you are not just your organism, your physical body, or your own particularized psyche, but that you—even if you don’t know it consciously, just as you don’t know consciously how to grow your hair—you are fundamental reality, which is beyond any limitation of time or space. You’re it. You are what there is.

The Hindus have a symbol for this thing that they call the Brahman or the Ātman; the Self. The Buddhists simply modify this by saying: if you have a symbol of it, which is something you believe in—as one might, say, believe in God, or believe in heaven, or life after death, or in an immortal soul—the fact that you believe is still an act of attachment, or clinging, which is unnecessary. And so an unnecessary thing is what we would call gilding the lily, or they use a wonderful phrase in Zen Buddhism: putting legs on a snake. Now, legs embarrass a snake. It needs no legs. And gilt kills the lily. So the Buddhists have worked out a religion of no religion—that is to say: of not believing in anything at all. Not because they believe that reality is nothingness, but because believing is unnecessary. It’s gilding the lily. So this was the fundamental idea of this morning’s lecture.

Now I want to go on this afternoon to put some of this in a kind of systematic and historical perspective, so that you all know where we are in time and space, and what all this is about, and how it came to be. Though the funny thing is that the Indians have no sense of history whatsoever. This is one of the fundamental gripes of Western scholars: that when they read all the documents of Indian literature, there is no historical consciousness running in it. And so you don’t know what period it comes from.

To begin with, they didn’t start writing anything down until about two centuries BC, maybe a little before. Prior to that, everything was transmitted orally and nobody has the faintest idea how far back it goes. The average educated guess today is that the Upanishads go back to about 800 BC, and they are the poems which represent the standpoint of Vedanta. Vedanta means: anta, almost our word “end” or “completion” of veda. Veda is our word “video,” “vidaere:” to see. Vid is “knowledge.” And so the most ancient scriptures of India are called Veda, or vision, you see. And they are poems in a mythological form. And the Upanishads constitute Veda-anta—that is to say: the completion of the vision—and they tell you the secret, the inner meaning that underlies the mythology.

So let us assume that the most educated guess of scholars today is that the texts called the Vedas are about 1500 BC, and the texts called Upanishad run from approximately 800 to considerably later, 800 to at least 100, and some even later than that. But the major Upanishads, such as the Brihad Aranyaka, the Kena Upanishad, the Isha Upanishad, the Mandukya Upanishad—all those are relatively early. So they would be anywhere from 800 to 600 prior to the time of the Buddha.

But still, you see, we are very vague about when all this started, because the Vedic tradition was brought to India from somewhere in central Asia. The Aryans who constitute the castes, the ruling people of India, and have done so for hundreds and hundreds of years, came from somewhere to the north, and have a common ancestry, linguistically, with our European languages. But they had no sense of history. If you write a story about a certain king who was involved with a certain sage, you alter the name of the king every time you retell the story. You simply make him the king at the present time, because then it becomes relevant. So nobody knows.

The Jews, on the other hand, had a sense of history and were very particular about when and where and what happened. So it’s far easier to make clear dates about the Old Testament and compare them with archaeological remains, than it is with anything from India. Especially, India is a tropical country where everything decays very quickly. It is a kind of swarming, lively, slimy turnover of life. So no one can be sure when all this started. So to even—Buddhism being a relatively late phenomenon out of Indian culture, the dates are a little bit more certain than they are with Hinduism.

So we know that Gautama the Buddha lived shortly after 600 BC. But we are very, very uncertain as to what he taught. There are two great sections of Buddhist scriptures. One is written in the Pali language, and the other in Sanskrit—although most of the Sanskrit texts no longer exist, and have to be studied in either Tibetan or Chinese translations. Western scholars are largely of the opinion that the Pali books represent more definitely the authentic teaching of the Buddha than the Sanskrit ones, although there is room for debate on this still. Pali is a sort of colloquial South Indian form of Sanskrit. For example, if you say nirvāṇa in Sanskrit, you say nibbāna in Pali. If you say karma in Sanskrit, you say kamma in Pali. It’s softened. So all Southern Buddhists, Theravadans, Hinayanists, make the Pali texts their authority. And the earliest Pali texts that we have are written on strips of palm leaf, like this, just about so long, with characters that look like almost all of them are indistinguishable from the figure eight, unless you look very closely. And they have holes in the middle of the leaves that they can be strung together and set between two boards of wood.

Well now, when you look at this record of the Buddha’s teaching, you raise questions. Because no human being sitting around in conversation with other people could ever have spoken this way. It simply is not natural conversation. What it is, is a highly tabulated form of instruction, tabulated in order to be memorized. So that it’s easy to remember things if you classify them under one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So there are—Buddhism is all numbers. There are three characteristics of being: duḥkha (suffering), anitya (impermanence), anātman (no-self). There are four steps. There are four noble truths. There are eight stages of the Noble Eightfold Path. There are ten fetters. There are twelve elements of the chain of dependent origination. Everything is numbered.

And this, therefore, takes us back to a time before writing when everything had to be committed to memory. Now, it is conceivable that if I were going to talk to you and I were going to examine you later to be sure that you had understood everything I said, that I would number my remarks and say, “Now you’ve got to remember first this, second that, third that.” And I would talk back to you and say, “What was the first thing? What was the second thing? What was the third thing?” But the style of those Pali scriptures is so artificial, and everything is repeated again and again and again so that it’s quite obviously something that monks did and put together on a wet afternoon with nothing better to do. It is terribly boring and I simply don’t advise anybody, except a serious scholar who wants to comb it all out and get the results, ever to bother reading the Pali scriptures. The advantage of the Christians, you see, is they have this inimitably beautiful English Bible translated under the reign of King James. And it is so exquisitely done and the Jews were great poets. And it is very readable. Buddhist scriptures are boring to the extreme—with exceptions.

So there is this body of Pali literature which is called Tipiṭaka. Tipiṭaka means three baskets, because the palm leaf manuscripts were stored in baskets. And three big baskets constitute the tradition of Hinayana or Theravada Buddhism. In addition to this, there is the Mahayana canon, or body of scriptures, which is one of the single biggest bodies of literature in the world. It is somewhat larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the official edition existing today is called Taishō Daizōkyō, which is a Japanese edition of the Chinese texts. And the other is called the Tengyur, which is the Tibetan edition, but that’s not so easily come by. But the standard edition of the Taishō Daizōkyō is a great, vast collection of volumes, all in Chinese, translating the Sanskrit scriptures.

Now, again, the general opinion of scholars is that the Mahayana sutras are from a later time than the Buddha. The important texts in this collection range in origin from 100 B.C., approximately, to about 400 A.D. And so, according to the standards of Western scholarship, these are forgeries. They are attributed to the Buddha, but actually composed by individuals living a lot later. Now, our literary morals would say this was forgery and that has a bad intent. But this is a modern idea. If we go back to Western scriptures, for example, we’ll see a book in the Apocrypha called The Wisdom of Solomon. The Song of Songs: attributed to Solomon, the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament: attributed to Solomon. It is absolutely inconceivable that Solomon wrote these books. The book of Deuteronomy is attributed to Moses. It is absolutely impossible that Moses wrote the book of Deuteronomy. But why is it attributed to Moses? Because the actual writer of this book was too modest to give it his own name. And he would therefore say, “I feel that I have been into a center of my consciousness that is beyond me. And I am reporting things from a level of my being which I cannot claim as my own. Therefore, I have to ascribe the authorship to a person who is archetypal.” Solomon represents wisdom. So certain Hebrew writers at a certain period of history, when they felt that they were in touch with real wisdom, would feel it immoral to say, “I, Ishmael Ibn Ezra, will put this forth in my own name.” On the contrary. That would be very immodest. I say: “This is a revelation from Solomon.” In those days, before copyright was considered the ethical thing to do.

So, in exactly the same way, when Indian Buddhists living long after the Buddha—living, say, in the University of Nalanda around the beginning of the Christian era or later. No, Nalanda is later than that. Nalanda takes us to 200 AD. Specifically to a man called Nagarjuna, who lived about 200 AD, who was the blinking genius of the whole Mahayana movement. We don’t know whether Nagarjuna wrote the scriptures he commented on, or only wrote the commentaries. But there’s a huge body of literature in Sanskrit, and is known to us mainly through its Tibetan and Chinese translations, called Prajñāpāramitā. Prajñā, as I explained to you, means “intuitive wisdom,” pāramitā “for going across,” that is to say, to the other shore. “Wisdom for crossing to the other shore.” And almost all of this literature has been translated into English by Edward Conze. And you can get selections from it in this book, which is now available in paperback, in the Harper Torch book series: Buddhist Texts Through the Ages. For the average person who does not want to be a specialist scholar, but wants to get a good idea of what all this is about, this is it. This has excellent selections from all types of Buddhist literature, but especially this class.

And it is conceivable that Nagarjuna wrote the scriptures in the name of the Buddha, and others did too, but they were simply, by their standards, too modest to say, “This is mine.” They are saying: “It comes from a deeper level of consciousness than my ego, and therefore is the Buddha’s.” Now, you see, in our morals, that’s forgery. In their morals, it’s not. So, in Buddhism you don’t have the same problem that you have in Christianity. In Christianity, we want to know what were the ipsissima verba, the very words of Jesus, and what was a late addition? Because the authority is so peculiarly involved in the historical Jesus. In Buddhism this is not the case. The Buddhists in general feel that Buddhism is like a tree. The Buddha planted the seed, and later the tree grows. Very definitely. You see, in Christianity, Jesus is the only incarnation of God. The Christians, Orthodox Christians, will on the whole argue there will never be, there was never, another incarnation of God. But in Buddhism it is of the essence of the thing that Buddhas can appear in the world again and again and again. Any one of you can become a Buddha. So there isn’t this fastening of authority to a particular historical time and place.

So then, the Buddhist scriptures represent—although they are all attributed to the Buddha—they represent an uncovering of questions which the Buddha raised. Now, for this purpose, it’s important to understand one thing that is not made clear in almost all the books on Buddhism that I’ve ever read. Buddhism is absolutely fundamentally a dialogue. And this dialogue—which is an interchange between a teacher and an inquirer, as with the teachings of Socrates—is quite different from an authoritative pronouncement. There are no teachings of Buddhism. Everything you will find stated as a teaching of Buddhism is actually a question, not a teaching.

Let’s go to very fundamental points. Buddhism deals with the problem of suffering. Because, after all, suffering is the problem. That’s what we mean by the whole idea of a problem. I suffer: I have a problem. So, if you don’t like suffering, you say, “How do I not suffer?” And you go to a wise guy and say, “I’m in pain. I’m anxious. I’m afraid. I’m distraught in the other. How do I not do it?” So the Buddha answers to this question: “You suffer because you desire. If you didn’t desire, your desires would never be frustrated, and so you wouldn’t suffer. So what would happen if you didn’t desire?”

Now, this is not a teaching. It is not saying: “You ought not to desire.” It is a request for making an experiment: “Could you possibly not desire?” So the inquirer goes away and he makes this experiment. He sees: “Can I possibly get rid of my desires?” And he discovers in the course of making this experiment that he is desiring to get rid of his desires. And so he returns to the teacher and says, “It is impossible not to desire. Because in trying not to desire, I’m desiring.” And the teacher says, “You’re getting warmer.” You see, in every respect, everything that the Buddha ever suggested that his followers should do was by nature of an experiment. Buddhism never uttered its final teaching; what it was actually after. All it describes are various experiments you can make to get on the road to it.

So it is of the nature of it that it is a dialogue. Indeed, many of the books of the Pali scriptures are called dialogues of the Buddha. So this is very, very important to understand: all these records and scriptures are interchanges. One of the first things, for example, that when I was starting to study Buddhism in my teens, I met a wonderful Japanese Sanskrit professor and he explained to me: Buddha taught three signs of being. duḥkha (the world as we live it is suffering), anitya (impermanent), anātman (without self). And he said, “Buddha teach duḥkha to counteract wrong view. Buddha teach anitya contradict wrong views nitya.” See? It was wonderful.

The whole idea, you see, is you can’t say what the truth is. So there is no dogma. All you do is you get going a dialogue, the effect of which is to counterbalance people’s wrong view or partial view. All Buddhism is view, the way you look at it. See? So the first step of the Noble Eightfold Path is called samyak-dṛṣṭi, which means: samyak, “perfect.” Our word “sum,” “summation,” comes eventually from the Sanskrit samyak. “Perfect view.”

There’s a wonderful story about Suzuki, who was giving a course on Buddhism at the University of Hawaiʻi, and he was going through the Four Noble Truths, and he got the fourth one. And he was sort of lazing around on a hot afternoon with a group of students, half asleep as he is as often as an old man. And he said, “First step of Noble Eightfold Path is: shoken Mean right view, complete view. All of Buddhism is view. You have right view, you have all of Buddhism. Right view is no special view. Second step of Noble Eightfold Path… I forget second step, you look it up in the book.” So I told this story to Morimoto Rōshi in Kyoto, and he said, “First step of Noble Eightfold Path”—in Japanese shoken. Sho means “correct,” ken means “view.” He said it is tch!

So what you have to understand, then, is simply that you can’t look up the teachings of Buddhism in the same way that you can look up the teachings of Hegel, Kant, Spinoza, Jesus Christ, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and so on. They don’t exist. They’ve never been written down. All that has been written down is the dialogue that leads up to the understanding. Somebody raised the question in this morning’s discussion about whether you needed other people—it was you, Virginia. And in a way you do, because this is the need of the guru. Now, the guru is not necessarily somebody who is a qualified master. The guru is something against which you bounce. It may be a book, it may be your own reflection in the mirror. “Said I to myself—said I.” But this dialogue is the way in Buddhism. Question–answer: mondō. That’s what all those Zen stories are. Mondō means question–answer. So a Zen story is called a mondō.

So this whole body of literature is simply feeling out a question. So then, what’s the question? What’s going on? As I said, the basic question, the way Buddhism approaches it, is: “I suffer. What shall I do about it?” Answer: “You suffer because you desire. Try not to desire.” Next question: “But I’m desiring not to desire.” Next answer: “Try not even to desire not to desire.” Or put it in this way: “Don’t desire not to desire any more than you can manage.” In other words, accept the facts as they are. But then I find I can’t help desiring to the extent that always makes me uncomfortable. Well, the question comes back: “Who is it that’s uncomfortable? Who’s complaining? Who are you?” This is always what it gets down to: who raises the question? Who, in other words, is in conflict with the universe? Find out who you are.

And this is always peculiarly difficult because it’s like trying, you know, to look at your own eyes without using a mirror, to bite your own teeth, to define yourself. And so all this literature is really the gyrations of somebody trying to define who he is, which will never succeed. And that is why it’s called the doctrine of the void. That one really has to be reconciled—not only reconciled, too, but delighted with the fact that you yourself are basically indefinable. If you were definable, you would be a mortal thing like anything else, and you would just dissolve. But so long as you’re not definable, you’re eternal. As much of you as you can’t catch hold of is the real you. But the price you pay for this privilege of being eternal is that you don’t know it. You can’t grab onto it, see?

So this comes out as follows. In the Buddhism that we have in the Pali Canon, the dialogue goes as far as all the techniques for renouncing desire, so that the general trend of Theravada Buddhism is ascetic. But what happened historically was that many of those monks who practiced all the ascetic exercises started to ask themselves the question, “Why are we doing this?” And they discovered that the reason they were practicing the ascetic exercises was that they were scared of life and wanted to get out of it, which nullified the effect of those exercises. In other words, they were acting in an unselfish way for selfish reasons. And all those monks who were simply aware and perceptive enough to recognize this then moved on into the Mahayana stage of development.

In other words, you can go through a tough meditation discipline where you try to control your thoughts completely and not think anything lustful or harmful or selfish and so on. But you are eventually compelled to come to the question: why are you doing this? And the answer is, of course, the same old reason I started with: I desire. And this is still desire.

So then the dialogue has to be carried on from that point in such a way that the problem is increasingly thrown back at the source of the question: who’s asking? Why asking? Until you see what they call in Zen that you are raising waves when no wind is blowing; that you are making the problem. And this comes back to the most fundamental, original ideas of Buddhism, which Sir Edwin Arnold expresses in his poem about the teaching of the Buddha:

Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels,

None other holds you that ye live and die,

And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss

Its spokes of agony,

Its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness.

But, you see, the whole game we play with ourselves is: I am not responsible. A person can turn back to their parents and say, “You got me in this mess! You two, males and females, were having fun in bed together, and as a result of this, you irresponsibly created me. And you didn’t provide for me properly—you were economically unsound or something, and I blame you for all this!” See? What an alibi that is! But all life is based on this game. And nobody will admit, you see, that the evil gleam in your father’s eye, when he was after your mother, was you. That same surge of life was just the same as you are, see? You stated the problem, and you can’t just blame somebody else. Because if you blame your parents and they are in any way blameworthy, they can always blame their parents for getting them into the mess, and all it goes the way back to Adam and Eve.

And you know what happened then? When the trouble started, God came around and said to Adam, “Man, what have you done?” And he said, “This woman that thou gavest me, she tempted me, and I did eat.” And then God went and looked at Eve, and she said, “The serpent gave it to me.” And God looked at the serpent, and the serpent didn’t say anything. Because the serpent knew all too well what the story was, but wasn’t going to let on. See, because the serpent is the unacknowledged part of God. Only: it mustn’t be—let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth. Especially, let not your right hand know what your left hand doeth, because the right hand is the hand that’s honest and out there. Shake hands with the right hand, eat with the right hand. But the left hand is the inauspicious hand: with that you clean up messes, and you eat with the other, see, so that you don’t get the two mixed. You mustn’t get your head mixed up with your tail. So this is called the seen hand, and this is the obscene hand. This is impropitious, this is propitious. Un-propitious, propitious. So keep that going, you see. Don’t give away the secret that these two hands, or two ends, are all one.

In mythology, the serpent ouroboros is eating its own tail. Now, this actually means it’s nourishing itself on its own excrement. But it doesn’t know it. If it did know it, it wouldn’t. So there is, just behind the serpent’s head, an unconscious place. You see, your eyes look out this way, they don’t look back that way. And by virtue of that, you make a block of unconsciousness in the circle, so that you don’t know what you’re getting is what comes from you. And so long as you don’t know, you’ll keep it up. If you say, “Well I, after all, realize this is nothing but me,” and you say, “Well, why bother? You’re just going round and around.” And that’s why total omnipotence or omniscience would have no future in it. Because you could do nothing, you could know nothing, except what you already know, and you’d know all of that. There would be no surprises. And the moment there isn’t a surprise, that means there isn’t something unconscious. Then you won’t have any life. So it all depends that anything happens at all on there being—besides being, besides power, besides consciousness, besides pleasure—non-being, impotence, unknowing, pain. Without this, nothing happens.

So then, if you say, “Oh, but I want to get rid of that side of things which is non-being, unknowing, impotence, pain,” the teacher is trying to show you, by the dialogue, that you don’t understand the way you have stated your own question. You haven’t thought it through. You are, in other words, desiring something that you don’t want. Let’s suppose in a very simple illustration of this: I don’t want to die. Okay. You have the problem of the wandering Jew who cannot die, who’s condemned to life, so that when he throws himself into the ocean, it throws him out. He casts himself into the fire, and the fire shrivels. You cannot die. You realize what a horror this thing is, because you can’t forget. You must go on accumulating memories forever and ever and ever and ever, until you become sick. You get indigestion of the multiplicity of memory. But people don’t ordinarily think this through. They say, “I’d like to go on living always. Please, I don’t want to die. Not yet, no.” But they don’t think it through. They say, “I want to go to heaven. I want to be reunited with all my friends and relations, and be happy forever and ever and ever.” You don’t realize what an absolute bore this state would be! You would be horrified if you don’t think it through. The point of the dialogue is that the teacher forces you to think through all your desires. Be careful of what you desire—you may get it!

And, you know, this is the story about the three wishes. There was once upon a time a person who discovered the ear of the statue of the oracle at Delphi in Greece. And it was found in an antique shop, wrapped in a little sliver of paper, which said, “Be back by three.” And this came into the hands of two very intelligent gentlemen. And I’m repeating a story that Gerald Heard told, a very intelligent gentleman who had a dinner party one evening in the presence of this ear. And they discussed what it meant. And they said, “Look, this ear is probably a wishing ear. You whisper things into it. Let’s try and work it out.” So you know how people are when they get in the presence of magic: they always ask it to do something trivial. So they said, “Make this vase turn upside down. This is our first wish.” How stupid can you get, you know? So they did that. Well, apparently nothing happened. But in a little while they all began to feel funny. And they felt more comfortable with their arms up in the air than lying on the table. Well, what had happened was, indeed, their gravity was reversed from the gravity of the vase. And they were very uncomfortable about this.

So they had now two wishes left. There were always three wishes. What’s the second wish? Obviously to undo the first one. So they said, “Let everything be as it was before we wished,” and they were comfortable again. Now they had one wish left with no possibility of reverting it. And one of the men said, “Let’s not take it. Let’s just abandon the whole thing.” But the other was an adventurous man. And he grabbed the ear and said, “I wish not to wish.” And at that moment the stone ear leapt out of his hand and fell on the hearth and hissed in flame and dissolved. But suddenly they found themselves sitting there in peace. Everything was just right the way it was, because they’d wished not to wish.

So, to desire not to desire must finally include the fact, you see, that you do desire, and that this is a feature of your nature in just the same way that blue is a feature of the sky, that feet have five toes each on them. You desire. And if you desire not to desire—that is to say, you desire not to be a human being—you’re fighting with the facts, which, as a matter of fact, are your own facts. This whole secret of the matter is that we construct our psychology so that we experience a whole segment of our experience as something that’s put on us. It’s the same thing as you blame your parents for saying, “You brought me into this world.” Well, water is wet, fire is hot, and I did not bargain for this. I didn’t arrange it. So by having a whole segment of our experience that we don’t assume responsibility for, and we say “You did it, and it’s not my fault,” you see, it is this that creates the problem.

1:24:41

Watts

Yes.

1:24:49

Watts

Yes, of course. Where he says in the Mahayana vows, “However innumerable the hangups are, I vow to conquer them all.” kleśa, in Sanskrit: the hangups.

1:25:04

Watts

Yes, they’re the kleśa. Yes.

1:25:11

Watts

Yes. Right, right. So you set yourself the infinite task.

1:25:37

Watts

See, again, that the vows must be understood in the context of the dialogue. Undertaking these vows is part of being involved in a dialogue with a teacher. And the teacher suggests that you undertake these vows, which are ridiculous.

1:26:02

Watts

Sure, but you won’t find out that they’re ridiculous unless you try them.

1:26:08

Watts

Oh, sure they are. Well, look, we’re going to have an intermission.

I had a very funny notion earlier today that I would read up a little bit on what I’m going to talk to you about. And I started in this book, got laughing because it doesn’t really amount to anything at all. It’s all words about words. And they were debating as to whether it was true that there’s such a thing as causality or that there isn’t, whether the cause and effect are the same event or different events. And they decided that they couldn’t be the same, because that would reduce the whole world to just a wadge of undifferentiated goo. On the other hand, they decided they couldn’t be completely different, because they’d have no connection with each other. And so the whole argument fizzled.

And you have to realize to what an enormous extent we are all utterly bewitched by words, and are trying all our lives long to solve problems which only words create. Because a human being has got himself into a very funny bind. Having developed words (which are enormously useful, obviously), we at the same time pay a price for them. And we are simultaneously, you see, helped and bewitched by words. And so you could say that being under māyā, under illusion, is also being spellbound and enchanted. Because when you lay a spell, you do it by spelling. You see? You make a magic with words. When a stage magician does some extraordinary feat in front of you, he always accompanies it with patter. And his talk, his line, is to distract your attention from what he’s actually doing. And so by getting you enchanted with words, you don’t notice what’s going on in the same way when people hypnotize you. It’s very difficult to hypnotize a person without talking to them, but very easy if you talk. And you can hypnotize people in all kinds of ways that don’t involve the standard routines. That is to say, the standard routines are making people stare at a bright object or at some revolving disc, or tricks of this kind. But you can induce hypnosis just with words, and they don’t even know they’re being hypnotized!

So in a way, then, all philosophical problems and all religious problems are problems of language. Because if you don’t use words, you don’t have any problems. That’s the most extraordinary thing. You think, you see, that you’ve got words to help you solve your problems, so that you can communicate with each other about things and help each other out and so on. That’s true. It does. To a certain extent, words do solve practical problems, like: “Please pass me the salt.” And: “Would you light the fire for me?” And: “Let’s go for a walk.” “Shall we go hunting today?” Et cetera. All these things can be solved by words.

But then, when you start really getting deeply involved in words, what you do is this: you assign words to various aspects of experience. But the thing is that you wouldn’t know what an aspect was unless you had words. The world is—it’s true—we say it’s differentiated because we see different shapes, different colors, and different motions, and we assign words to these differentiations and so come to believe that the differentiations in the world are really different. But actually, when you see a cloud, it’s true, the cloud has got lots of bumps on it. Now the question arises, then: how many bumps does a cloud have on it? And are these bumps the same as the cloud or different from the cloud? Well, that’s an asinine question, because it’s only a question about how you’re going to define it. It isn’t a question about the cloud. And so, in exactly the same way as a cloud is constantly moving and changing—or watch some cigarette smoke in the air; this is a lovely weaving pattern. Watch it in a beam of sunlight, you know? And it’s intricate, like a marvelous Moorish arabesque. But is each line of smoke a thing? Is it a separate event?

Now, you see, the Buddhists look at the world as a weaving of smoke: that everything is in a state of flux, or flow. And so the differentiation of things cannot hold, except as a purely abstract and intellectual construct. But the power of these words is such that they can alter your feelings. And you notice this in early childhood—that children become completely fascinated with words. And they squabble more about words than about anything. Also, children become fascinated by adults’ sense of time. A child goes through a very strange development because, on the one hand, a child has an enormous capacity for living in the present; for getting completely lost in, say, throwing pebbles into the water and watching the waves, or making funny noises and just making them and making them and making them, or sitting in front of a mirror and making faces.

But the moment children get involved with their parents and their parents’ system, which the children don’t understand because parents playing—what happens, you see: adults play games and they don’t let the children in on the rules. They say, “You’re not old enough to understand this yet.” And they’re not frank about it because they’re not too clear themselves. So children are constantly obfuscated by our rules, but also fascinated. So then, the time thing really gets children, because they’re taught that all the adults are busy looking forward to something, see? So there are great occasions like Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, the fireworks, you see, and your birthday. And that’s a special occasion. So children get this feeling that—they’re like the calendar—to cut out all the intervening days. And they just can’t wait till the next event comes up. And so they want Christmas, and then boom, birthday, then boom, Easter, you see, and boom, Fourth of July, or whatever, like that, you see. They just can’t wait. And this is because, you see, they are showing their bewitchment.

Then, also, another thing children do is calling each other names. And they get very, very head up, because somebody says to Johnny, “You’re a sissy.” And you call me a sissy and that’s just terrible. I am not a sissy! Or I am not—if he’s learned to identify himself as a boy and somebody says he’s a girl, there’s a real fight about that because they are terribly particular that the right word should apply to the right thing. And I am not what you tell me I am. Because the whole education of a child is really telling him who he is. All the teachers, all the adults, all the other children are constantly telling each other who they are. And at last we believe it. And so you come not to know who you are at all. You come to believe that you’re what everybody tells you you are.

And so this gets very funny indeed, because we are all at once telling each other that we are unique. See, you’re different from me, and you’re the only thing like you in the world. But at the same time we’re saying to each other that you ought to be just like me. Because, after all, if you’re not really like me, you’re so far out, you’re not human. And so the more we tell each other that we are like each other, the less point there is in talking to each other. Because, after all, if you’re just the same as I am, we’ve got nothing to talk about. I can’t learn anything from you because you’re just like me. Then, on the other hand, if you really are different from me, then I can find out something I never knew before. But I told you who you were in the first place, and you told me who I was. So we’re making each other up. So long, that is to say, as we live in that domain of words and defining who and what we are.

Now look at this whole thing. This is the situation. Māyā, then, is to a very large extent a verbal creation. You notice cats and dogs, they don’t have a religion as far as anyone can see. They don’t go to church, they don’t have big philosophical problems, and we say they’re for that reason uncivilized. But they’re not really uncivilized. They have other things they do, which are just as complicated, but they don’t have this hang-up with words. Words are magic, you see. “In the beginning was the word. By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the hosts of them by the breath of his mouth,” according to the Bible. That means not that the real world that you are looking at now, this wasn’t created by words, but the world of separate things, separate people, separate events—that was created by words.

Now, I hope this is—I’ve said this to some of you before because you’ve been to earlier seminars—but this is absolutely fundamental for understanding what the Buddhist Mahayana doctrine of emptiness is. Śūnyatā. You see, in Sanskrit, śūnya means “void,” and the suffix ta means “-ness.” So: “voidness.” And all the world is called śūnyatā, and that word doesn’t mean that really there isn’t anything, but it means there isn’t any thing. It is saying that the world does not consist of distinct things or distinct events. Things are nouns and events are verbs. And if you pick up any available, unhandleable piece of nature, the idea that this is a thing is just an idea. Because, you see, this that I am touching is not an idea. And it’s not a thing because you can ask immediately, “Well, how many things is it?” Well, that depends on how you divide it. You can say, “Well, it has a top and a bottom. That makes two. Then there’s cardboard covered with paper, and that makes four.” But then,S what about all the letters printed on it? They are also things, aren’t they? What about the constituent molecules, the distinct electrons, that prove themselves to be there upon physical analysis? How many things is it? It’s as many things as you can figure.

Because, you see, a thing is a unit of thought. A thing is a think. In English, “thing” and “think” are alike. In German, Ding and denken. In Latin, res means thing, and reor means to think. To reify, we use even in English, means to thingify. When you say, for example, “The lightning flashed.” Now, actually, the flash is the same as the lightning. So you reify a thing called lightning, which does something called flashing. And so you create a ghost. And one of the great Chinese masters, Linji—lived in the Tang Dynasty about 800 AD—said that his work as a Buddhist teacher was to beat the ghosts out of you, to exorcise you, to, in other words, disenchant. And so one comes to understand that there are in nature no things and no events.

So this is the śūnyatā doctrine. Things and events have only a verbal reality. And that is a thing that is as powerful for a person who is an intellectual as for a person who is not an intellectual. It isn’t just that this is a problem from which the brainy people suffer. All human beings suffer from it, because even the less brainy people are just as subject to verbal enchantment and to spellbinding and the magic of words as the very intellectual people. A child will sometimes escape from this, as in the story of the emperor’s new clothes, when it is the child who notices that the adults are deceiving themselves with words.

So then, śūnyatā is the assertion that, actually speaking, the real world—which we will call in our way of talking the physical world or the natural world or even the material world—contains no things and no events. That things and events are purely abstract creations. Now it’s interesting, you see, that when we try to designate the real world, we’ll use, say, the word “material.” And people get terribly confused by this, because the word “material” has opposed meanings within it, like the word “responsible.” If you say to someone, “You’re responsible,” this is at one moment telling them that you’re free and able to make decisions on your own, but at the same time telling the person that you’d better decide according to law, because you’ll be held responsible if you make the wrong decision. It’s telling them all in the same breath that they’re free and bound.

And of course this goes back to the original double bind, that when society tells the child that it is a free agent—in other words, you are responsible—the child is unable to resist this definition, because a social influence on another person, especially a child, is completely strong and irresistible. So the child is thereby compelled to believe that it’s free. Now, I’m not saying whether you are or are not free, this is not the point. You may be, you may not be. But to be told that you must be free is a contradiction. And that’s the situation every child has put in. So on the authority of society, you are told that in a way you’re independent of society. And you must believe that you are, because we told you so.

So when, in the same way, we use the word “responsible” and it has a double take in it, so does the word “material.” When many people use the word “material,” they think they mean what you can touch and see and so on—that is to say, the real world. But then there are another kind of people who want to say that the material world is an illusion and that the spiritual world is the only world that’s real. Even in, say, Judaism and Christianity, God is spirit, whatever that is. And God created the material world, so the material world is real, but a lower kind of reality than spiritual reality. St. Thomas Aquinas would define the material world as having contingent being as distinct from necessary being. Necessary being is being that is being that exists of itself. It has what’s called aseity, which means “it exists of itself.” Buddhists use the words svabhāva, or “own being,” for this same Christian theological word.

And so, but when you start thinking: what do you mean by the material world? The word material is related to the word māyā, because matter is from the Sanskrit root matr, which is the same root from which māyā comes. And māyā originally from the root matr means “to measure.” It’s a word that’s used in laying out the foundations of the building. In other words, marking off an area, you meter it. So the material world has a dual sense, you see. It means on the one hand the world that is actually here, the real world, but it also means the world as measured. Now, the world as measured is the way you figure it, not the way things are. So you see the duplicity in the idea of material? It works both ways. And so you say about something, “does it matter?” That means: is it substantial enough to worry about, or is it just a ghost? If it doesn’t matter, then it’s spirit. You know this Christian science joke? “What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter.” So we say, “Mind out.” “Use your mind.” “I mind whether this happens or not.” But that’s the same thing as saying, “It matters whether it happens or not.”

And language is so exciting when you start to analyze it in this way, because it reveals all the jokes that are in it. And so you discover, then, that many, many words, many fundamental ideas are full of duplicity. For example, the word “cleave” in English means “to separate” and “to cling to.” The word sacer in Latin means “sacred” and “accursed.” The word autus in Latin means “high” and “deep.” And in ancient Egyptian they use words like “strong-weak.” That’s how we would have to translate it. But you will find again and again—these are just a few I mentioned—there are ever so many words that have this double take in them and mean both of a pair of opposites. And so the word “material” is one of the very best examples of this.

So when the Buddhist says, then, that the nature of the world is śūnyatā, he is not saying that if you were truly enlightened, your state of consciousness would be blank, and therefore that there would be no colors, no shapes, no outlines, no any kind of goings-on. Although there have been Buddhists who did make that misinterpretation. If you read, for example, the sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, this is a Chinese Buddhist text recording the sermons of a great teacher who lived about 700 AD. This was his sort of flourishing time. He died in 713. His major concern is combating the prevalent idea among many of his contemporaries that enlightenment consisted in having a blank mind. They practiced the way of meditation that I was talking about yesterday, when we were discussing samādhi as voidness of consciousness. And they tried to stop their sense processes altogether. You can approximate that, you see, by concentrating on a very, very restricted sense field. Say, you can start counting your breathing, or you can focus your eyes on the little light on the tip of an incense stick, or on a spot, or anything. There’s a Buddhist text, you know, that describes this. And when it says, or on anything, the commentator has made a footnote and says underneath, but not any wicked thing. You know, clergy are the same in the world over! So then, when you concentrate on this small point, and you’ve got your mind absolutely closed on this, then the idea is to knock away the point. And there’s nothing at all; that you are not conscious of any differentiation. You keep your eyes closed, your ears plugged, and try to turn off everything else. See?

Now, this man, the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, said that is not Buddhism at all. That is a way to become a stone Buddha. And you might just as well be a lump of wood or a piece of rock. The real meaning of emptiness, he said, is like space. Because space contains all the universe but isn’t stained by it. In other words, you cannot knock a nail into space, but you can have a nail in space. So he said in the same way that the space is great, so the capacity of your mind, or your original consciousness, is likewise great. Whereas if you exclude everything, you make it small.

So what is negated in the idea of emptiness of śūnyatā is not the world that we call the physical world. What is negated is concepts about it. It is saying there is no conceptual framework in which you can pin this world down. Because, you see, the human being uses his conceptual framework to try to cling to his existence. And he will try to cling to his existence when he has been fooled into thinking that non-existence could overcome existence.

Now, in existentialism, as it’s set forward by people like Binswanger and Rollo May and so on, they keep saying you are not an authentic human being unless you’re anxious. Because the moment you realize that you exist—and this is indeed self-consciousness, this is coming to be aware of life, appreciating life; I exist and isn’t that extraordinary—then you at the same time become aware that you have the possibility of not existing. As soon as you realize that you’re alive, you know you could be dead. And so this comes with what Korzybski called time-binding. By realizing time, by being able to predict the future, you see other people die and you know you will die. Maybe animals don’t worry about that. We don’t know. Apparently they live more in the present and work on the assumption that they’re immortal until they’re not, which is a very good assumption. But we predict, you see, so that the sensation of being implies non-being. But we don’t see through this all the way. We think that non-being will swallow being. So that whereas there’s only non-being exists for a short time, non-being could go on forever. But we don’t realize that non-being is as much dependent on being as being is on non-being. This is relativity.

And śūnyatā also, besides meaning emptiness, means relativity. It means, when you say in Madhyamaka philosophy—this is called Madhyamaka, that Nagarjuna invented; this is the subject of the seminar, just in case anyone’s forgotten. Madhyamaka means the philosophy of the middle way. And the middle way refers to what is in common between all oppositions, but can’t be stated. Because when you talk, you can only talk about opposites, since all words are labels on pigeonholes called classes. So when you say, “Does it exist or does it not exist?” “Is it in the category of existence, like a horn, or the category of non-existent, like the horns of a rabbit, or the child of a barren woman, or a eunuch’s beard?” You know, they have all these ancient metaphors that come from the Upanishads that go through all Buddhist literature. The horns of a hare.

There is, incidentally, a bar in a place called Van Horn in Texas, very close to El Paso, where there is a stuffed jackrabbit with horns on it behind the bar. If I’m ever driven through there, I’ll get some postcards of it to send to my various Buddhist friends, because…!

But anyway, the point in saying that śūnyatā means relativity, saying that everything that we call a thing or an event has no svabhāva, which means no own being—this is how Edward Conze translates it—because it doesn’t exist by itself. It only exists in relation to everything else. So, in other words, you don’t know that there is a material object unless you see it in a space. So the space and the object support each other mutually. You wouldn’t know the space was there unless the object was there. So although you think about things as if they existed independently, that’s because you’re bewitched. But when you go into it more deeply, you realize, of course, nothing can exist by itself. Everything goes with everything else.

But this is above all true of you. If you say, “I am a thing,” “I am an event,” this is because you’ve made the mistake of identifying your actual reality with your idea of yourself, which is only a symbol. And so we are panicked (going back to the way the child is brought up) by our ideas of ourself. People say, “You are this, you are that, you are the other thing.” You are the winner—hooray! You’re the loser—ugh! See? That’s awful.

But actually, you’re neither. You say to somebody, you know, “You’re going to go on living! Hooray!” Put off dying for another few years. Great. They say, “No, you must die at once.” Oh, that’s terrible! It’s no different. Because all you are going to gain with more time is more anxiety, longer to worry about. What’s your objection to dying now? It’s just an idea. That’s what gives us trouble. Oh, it hurts. Well, what about that—pain?

This is a thing that is very largely educated. When, as a child, you have pains, your mother says to you, “Oh, you poor darling!” And you think about yourself, “Oh, my poor darling!” You see? When you throw up, you vomit, she says, “Ugh!” When you go to the toilet and you make smells, she says, “Bleagh!” But you know you like that smell originally. It was great. Especially your own. But you were taught not to like it. And then, when people were around you, your friends and relatives and old people, and they started to get sick and die, you watched everybody worry about them. And then you learned to worry. So all this conditioning is put into you that it’s great to go on living. It’s terrible to stop living. You see? All this is learned.

Well, actually, there is no problem about it. Stop implies start just to start implies stop. Don’t you realize that anything that happened once can happen again? Where were you before you were born? Any recollections? And suddenly here you were. All right, where will you go when you’re dead? Same place you were before you were born. Where else is there to be? Can you experience nothing forever and ever? So, you see, the nature of being is not just being. The nature of being is being/non-being. And this, though, is only words. This is why in the Buddhist doctrine they say it is neither being nor non-being. Nobody can say what it is. You can only show it. And that’s why in Zen, when you ask what is the ultimate nature of Buddhism, the master does this. Or he may just say, “Ha-ha!” Now this is no symbolism attached to this. He’s not saying the ultimate nature of Buddhism is in some way or another symbolized by a matchbox, or that a matchbox is a manifestation of the universal energy field. See? All that is taught.

The point is: get to this. So it is called not only śūnyatā, which means “voidness” or “relativity,” it’s called tathātā. Tathātā we translate “suchness.” And tathātā is simply thatness. When a child first starts talking, it says “Da.” The first thing a child says: “Da, da, da.” And in our culture we say it’s calling its father. And we say “Dada.” Unless it says “ma” first and then it means “Mama.” But the child is actually saying “da,” which is our word “that.” See? Point. “Da, da, da.” So tathātā is “thatness.” It’s there, you see, what you can’t talk about.

So then, the real nature of samādhi, or in meditation, is to learn to be aware without using words. And you find that, of course, you’re hypnotized by words, and they keep running in your head automatically, and you believe them. But the art of practicing, say, zazen is to learn not to exclude anything from your senses. Let all sights and sounds and smells and feelings come to you, but don’t call them anything. Stop naming them. Because, after all, if you keep talking and thinking all the time, do you realize you have nothing to think about except thoughts?

Supposing I never stop talking. Some of you only know me in a talking scene and you may think that I talk all the time. I don’t. I occasionally listen to other people talk and read what other people have to say. That gives me something to talk about. Well now, thinking is a kind of talking. Thinking is sub-vocal talking. Now, if I think all the time, I don’t have anything to think about except thoughts. So to have something to think about, you must stop thinking some of the time, just as you must stop talking some of the time to know what other people have to say.

So meditation is the art of stopping thinking for the time being. That’s the first stage of it. There’s a second stage—I’ll explain it in a moment. But the first stage is to learn how to suspend thought. And you can do that by thinking about nonsense. That’s why those chants that they sing that I played to you don’t mean anything at all. And they are for the purpose of stopping thinking. Because the easiest way to do it is instead of trying to stop thinking is to look at your thoughts as meaningless words. That’s when it’s funny. You know, you get a funny feeling by taking the word “yes” and saying it several times. You think: well, that’s a strange noise that we use. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so, by this way, you tease yourself out of thought and you get into the no-thought state. Then, when you are in the no-thought state and you are simply observing the world without commentary, you realize that there are no problems in the world. There is no time. Likewise there is no eternity. There is no this and likewise there is no that, because this and that are purely verbal creations. So if you want to say anything at all, you just call it suchness.

Now then, when you can do this, you will discover that you can go a stage further: that you can go on thinking but fundamentally preserve an attitude of not thinking. You aren’t under the limitation as to say to yourself, “Well, you mustn’t think that. That would be naughty.” That would be the wrong non-Buddhist thing to do. You can perfectly well think and conduct all kinds of practical business and live a complete human life. But once you’ve learned the secret of what’s called mushin in Zen, “no mind” or “void mind,” you can go on because you are no longer fooled by your thoughts.

So we had a marvelous discussion in Japan with a Zen master. He was explaining, just as I’ve explained to you, all about meditation being non-thinking. And then he said, “You know, it’s the same way as the Japanese carpenters. They built without a plan.” And so, in the same way, you don’t need a conceptual framework to live your life. So I asked him a question. I said, “What about making a plan without having a plan for a plan?” That really stopped him. There was a ghastly silence. I think he got the point that the interpreter was functioning. Because later we had another conversation in which he made the most beautiful little thing. When he said—we were discussing all the people who were translating the various texts of Zen Buddhism into English, and he said, “This is a waste of time.” There’s no need to translate all this stuff. “Because,” he said, “if you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You can use the dictionary, the Bible, or Alice in Wonderland.” He said, “After all, the sound of the rain needs no translation.”

So when once a monk asked a Zen master, “How do you get into the path?” See? All I’ve been talking is theory. Now you ask me: how do you practice it? And he replied, “Do you hear the stream?” He said, “Yes.” He said, “There is the way to enter.”

Well now, we’ve been going through what has been called the central philosophy of Buddhism, which is the title of a book by Professor Murti on this particular school of Buddhist philosophy founded by the sage Nagarjuna, who lived about 200 AD, and is called Madhyamaka, or the Middle Way. And this school centers around the idea—or, strictly speaking, the non-idea—of śūnyatā, or “emptiness.” And I’ve been trying to explain that emptiness is not like Western nihilism—that is to say, it’s not a theory of the universe that, for example, in reality there is nothing at all, and that all that we consider to be reality is just imagination. It’s not exactly that point of view. Śūnyatā describes rather an attitude to life which could be called not clinging or not hung up. Nothing to be hung up on.

So that the basic point is: what is most real about you, what is your inmost final irreducible self, is no other than what there is. Only, nobody can say what this is, because you can’t get at it, just like you can’t bite your own teeth. But what is the irreducible self is not any one of any pair of opposites that you can think of. It isn’t being, it isn’t non-being. It isn’t life, it isn’t death. It isn’t here, it isn’t there. It isn’t hard, it isn’t soft. Because in the same way that the eyes, in order to see shape and color, have no color themselves, so whatever is fundamental to existence cannot be classified or categorized in terms of anything existing. It always, to use the old word, it transcends it.

So that the Madhyamaka school is a (as I pointed out) dialectical method, a conversation, whereby—in the relationship between a student and a teacher—the teacher debunks every belief that the student proposes as a method of securing himself spiritually. Because human beings want to believe something, want to have a religion, want to have a theory about life, because of their basic failure to realize that you’re not just something that came into the universe, that is here temporarily and will disappear, or, worse still, be trapped in a universal system forever and ever and be exploited and brutally treated—a lot of people have that fantasy—but that you are the trap. You are, in other words, what is fundamentally and forever real.

Only, you don’t have union with this reality, or you don’t have identity with this reality, through a system of memory. Ordinarily, you know who you are because you remember. You remember yourself as a child, and you are taught to rely on memory as the mainstream of your identity. But actually, the you that you are by virtue of memory is quite superficial. You do not, for example, remember how to be male or female. You’re one or the other, but you don’t know how you do this. You don’t remember how to be white or colored. You don’t remember how to be a blonde or a brunette, unless you have some technique for artificial coloration. You don’t remember how to have blue eyes or brown eyes. You didn’t remember how to get born—not consciously. Of course, we have other ways of memory. The sequence of molecules in our DNA is a kind of memory.

But, in other words, what I’m saying is that you are far more than anything you can possibly remember. You don’t need to remember, consciously, who you are. Just like you don’t need to know in words how to move your fingers. You just do it. So, in this way, you do not need to remember coming back and back and back and back again into this world. It’s always you. And all of you sitting around here are just as much you as I am.

So if you get this point, you see, you don’t have to hold on to anything. You don’t have to believe in it. It’s just the way things are. You don’t need to cling to anything, because you’re it. If you want, you would need something to cling to. You would need a religion. You would need a faith. You would need a crutch. But because you are the foundation of the universe, you don’t need a crutch at all. That’s the meaning of this whole doctrine of emptiness: nothing to cling to.

So the actual discipline—the method, you might say—of the Madhyamaka philosophy, is a dialogue, as I said, in which everybody’s beliefs get debunked. And you find out that any opinion or point of view you insist on, cling to—you believe that there is God, that there is not God. An atheist is as much a believer as a theist. A theist, a believer in God, hopes very much that there sure is a God to look after him. An atheist hopes to goodness there isn’t. Because the atheist is a sinner and doesn’t want to get into trouble with the Almighty after death, and so it’s very convenient not to have a God. The theist hopes that he will be preserved from death and from impermanence by a loving God. But you can show both the theist and the atheist that they are alike believers; that they’re clinging to something. The believers in reincarnation are clinging to the idea of continuity, the believers in annihilation after death are clinging to the idea that this life is all there is. It’s just a trip between the maternity ward and the crematorium. You know: let’s be ordinary. Let’s be as unimaginative as we can about existence, and pride ourselves on being practical, folksy, down-to-earth people. So the maternity ward and the crematorium is obviously all there is. By believing in that you define yourself as a certain kind of character, and you have an interest in being that sort of person. If I believe there’s something else, I have an interest in being a more magical person, you see? I’ve—spooky; there’s something else to all this, you see. And there are all kinds of roles you can play.

But basically, this point of view of Nagarjuna is: you don’t need a thing, because you are it. Only, you have somehow become fascinated—in the sense of hypnotized, spellbound, enchanted; as when you close your attention on a small area of the visual field, and you get absorbed as when you read, for example, a mystery story. You become absorbed in the plot. When you put the beak of a chicken on a chalk line, the chicken is fascinated and can’t get its beak off the line. So, in exactly the same way, what we call the conscious attention that human beings have is your nose on a chalk line. And you are fascinated with playing that you are just this particular individual. And all your life is involved in your own game, you see? And so, being thus fascinated you’ve forgotten the background of the whole thing.

So this way is—I would say in a way that the Madhyamaka philosophy is an act of nerve; that it is making the gamble that there is simply no concrete floor to hit when you fall. Everything is falling, see? The whole universe is a process of change, of flux. And what we’re doing is this. You know, I have a car that is a monstrous thing that I got fixed with; a big Cadillac. And it’s so low slung that every time I go over a rough road I’m liable to scrape the bottom of the car. And every time this thing is going to scrape I go “Aargh!” like this, and someone could say to me, “Where is this hurting you?” Well, I say, “In my pocket book.” Actually, when the car bumps and scrapes itself, it doesn’t hurt me. Not really. But I am identified with the cost that it will require to repair the transmission. So we’re all, all the time, “Aaagh!” about things, you see? How awful it will be to die. “Aagh!” You see? And we’re doing this constantly. “Ooh!” And defending ourselves like this. What might happen? what might happen?

Well, this theory is: nothing’s going to happen. When you die, this is simply the disintegration of a particular memory system, and another memory system will start up somewhere else, because it always is. You are other memory systems than mine, and you are just you (as much people) as I am. So if my point of view disappears, your point of view is still there. But every “your” point of view is “my” point of view, because that’s what you call it.

So, to put it in this way, it’s really very simple. Honestly, this is the most elementary idea there is, and therefore quite difficult to understand. There is no such thing as not existing—permanently. There is such a thing as not existing temporarily. It’s an interval. So when you’re dead, that is the disappearance of a particular accumulation of memories. When you were born, you didn’t have any memories that you knew about anyway to bring over. So you started, and you had to be someone. If you ask, “Who would I have been if my father had had another wife?” well, you would have been someone else. But you had to be someone. So when you disappear, that’s the end of your memory system. And later on—only, you won’t know it’s later, because with the memory system time goes out of the picture too. But nevertheless, just as you have already done, you will wake up again like when you were born the first time. Or was it the first time? The umpteenth time. And you will be you. Because there just has to be someone.

And it doesn’t make any difference that, suppose that the whole planet is destroyed and blown up, the entire solar system is dissolved, the galaxy disappears—there are plenty of other galaxies and there’s enough time. Anything that has happened once can happen again. And not only the same way, but in ever so many different ways. So relax! You will, in other words, transform again and again and again and again through all possible modalities of being. And don’t cling to it.

Now, whenever Western people face oriental ideas, there is a kind of a fixed notion that oriental people lack concern. Now, Tillich took this word, “concerned,” and made a big thing of it. He said: if you are really concerned about life, and you feel that there is a depth to it, there’s more than appears on the surface and you’re interested in that, that is the same thing as believing in God. You don’t have to believe that there is an old gentleman with whiskers in charge of the universe. But so long as you are concerned—you feel that existence is marvelous and important—you believe in God.

But then, this idea of concern goes further. Concern is also believing that other people are important, that material life is important, that it’s worth taking trouble—say, to take care of your own body, to take care of your house, to take care of your children, to take care of this, that, and the other. This is to be concerned. And the general feeling of Western people about Indians and Chinese is that they’re not really concerned. It is believed that they are basically passive in their attitude. And there are all sorts of anecdotes and tales that everybody knows to give some foundation to this.

I had a friend who, during the Second World War, used to fly across the hump, across the Himalayas, from China into India. He was an entertainer, and he belonged to a special unit of entertainers—he was a ventriloquist—and he used to go to different United States military camps in China and give shows for all the GIs there. But this wasn’t enough in itself, and he just voluntarily went out on all sorts of adventures. And so, in flying the hump, he often got on a plane that was carrying Chinese coolies from China into Burma to work on the Burma Road. Well, on the plane they had nothing to do, so they gambled. And since they didn’t have any money, they put very interesting stakes on the game. When it was all counted up, the man who finally lost had to jump off the plane. Now, you see, we would say, “Oh, that is an utter disrespect for human life!” You are just expendable, he is just a cipher. We think about, when we look at Chinese people, for example, they all look the same, because we don’t know them very well. We forget that we all look the same to them, that we look as equally lacking individuality, lacking in soul, as they might look to us. And so we think that they think life is cheap. You can throw anybody’s life away, destroy them at any minute.

There was this thing in the Chronicle the other day about this trial of some murderer in China, and they put on a big show, and they sentenced him to death, and immediately shot him. There have always been pictures in the Western papers. This goes back for hundreds of years, ever since newspapers existed. We’ve always had occasional stories on the Chinese disregard of life and Chinese executions. You know, the most highly civilized nation in the West, the German people who invented Brahms and Beethoven and Bach and all that, equally gassed a million Jews. You know? Who’s to say that the West is better than East?

But the thing is that in the back of the mind of most Oriental people is a feeling that we don’t have: that life is indestructible. You don’t have it just once. It’s always there, it’s always around. There’s as much time as you need. Only: you don’t carry over a memory of it. Because if you could, if you had to remember, you would be bored. It’s so nice that you don’t have to. If you could think when you were a child, and how wonderful the world was because you had never seen it before. And you remember how your taste buds were so alive, and now they’re perhaps not so good? You’re used to it. Well, just by virtue of forgetting, you see, you can have life renewed again and again and again, and it’ll never be boring.

So this, then, is the basis, first of all, of an attitude of: you needn’t tense up. Maybe your plane is going to crash into a mountain and annihilate you instantly. Maybe, you know, you’re going to die and so on, and that looks like—it is the see through that illusion. The world goes on, and the world is the real you. Because you, as a particular physical organism, are a performance of the universe in just the same way as a wave on the water is a performance of the sea. And you’ll do it again, but the particular continuity of any individual conscious memory is obviously something that has to come and go, arise and subside.

So then, now, the Westerners, as I say, feel that this is a passive attitude; that this is a kind of callousness, a lack of feeling, a lack of concern for the intense reality of individual life. But don’t you see that, if we overemphasize intense concern for individual life, that we are going to create something quite as [???] which ignores the value of individual life?

Imagine yourself in the 1984 kind of state where individual life is unimportant, everybody is expendable. We say: sure, that’s pretty bad. But imagine yourself in the opposite politics, where everybody is so goddamn important that they’re not allowed to die. So what we are doing in overvaluing the individual is: we are increasing the population of the world to the point of self-strangulation. They used to say: well, we are overpopulated in India, but eventually the cholera will take care of it. And the Westerner says that won’t do. The Westerners, the British, arrived in India and they found that widows cremated themselves in their husbands' funeral pyres. It was called sati. And the British immediately put a stop to this. This they considered the most barbarous practice.

Imagine too that, hundreds of years ago, when the king of a near eastern tribe died, all his servants were buried alive with him. Because they felt that they had no identity apart from their master. If he died, that was the end. The project was finished. And we say: how could people regard themselves so little? Thomas Mann used the image—he said: people in those days were as if they had no backs to their heads. They were just masks. They were faces. Later on, we grew backs to our heads and felt enclosed, and that I exist independently and closed up my thing here. I’m not just a face on the sky. So there is an eternal debate going on between the people who say personality, individuality, is terribly important, and the most vital concern in life is to be concerned with individuality, and the people who say, on the other hand, oh, individuality is just an illusion. It comes and goes. It is a fleeting feature, you see?

Now, the whole notion of Madhyamaka, the middle way, is that both these points of view are right and wrong. They are both wrong when you adhere to them and you cling to them. They’re both right when you don’t. So this is why, out of—you remember I made these two technical terms, prajñā, karuṇā. When you see a figure often of the Buddha, he is accompanied by two attendants on either side of him. One is called Manjushri and the other is called Samantabhadra. Manjushri carries a sword. Samantabhadra, what does he have? No, they all have flame orioles. I think he has a wheel in his hand. The sword is cutting through all entanglements. No hang-ups. But Samantabhadra represents compassion, karuṇā. These are the two wings. One, you see, this one represents total detachment, seeing that nothing really matters. It doesn’t matter at all. That’s this guy, Manjusri. The other fellow is: you all matter. This is the spirit of compassion. And so these balance each other.

So do not be under the impression that because the flavor of these ideas—when we look at them from our accustomed habits of emotion, habits of thought—they look at first sight very, very cold, passionless, apathetic. It doesn’t matter. As we say, I couldn’t care less. The only way to understand this is to do your best to feel yourself in to this point of view: what would you do if you hadn’t a care in the world? What would you do if you had no anxiety? Would you just sit down and do nothing? Would you really? I don’t think you would.

If you remember an old song out of the West that says, “Walking on air, never a care, something is making me sing. Tra-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la, like a little bird in spring.” Remember that? Years ago. Something is making me sing, although I’m walking on air with never a care. See? Once you don’t have anxiety, you have energy. That energy is what represents this fellow on this hand, Samantabhadra. When I asked a Zen master once, “What does Samantabhadra mean?” He said, “It means to be in the middle of the Sahara Desert with a high-powered car.” Go any direction. Lots of energy, see?

So if you don’t care, if you are not concerned as to what’s going to happen to you, what the awful-awfuls at the end of the line will be, you know this. Everybody here has once or other in their lives been in a ghastly situation when all you could do was just, as it were, wrap your head up and wait. When you are in a tremendous storm in the sea, there’s nothing you can do about it. Just nothing. And all you do is: you just turn off the engines and drift. There’s nothing else to do. We’ve all been through that sort of experience. And so any agony that life can present to you, keep, as it were, keep going. You can die and disappear. But out of non-being, the reflection of it is being. It’s the echo of it. Just as non-being is the echo of being.

But when you see that, you see, and you are in the state of not resisting anymore, not in this frightful sort of aaaugh, it’s going to happen—see?—then suddenly you find that you are endowed with tremendous energy. You are wasting your energy, as it is, being anxious and defending yourself all the time, building up barriers. You see, we do the same thing politically: we are wasting our energy fighting a war in Vietnam, which is immensely expensive. With every kind of money that has been invested in this war, we could have given everybody in the world cakes and ale. But all modern warfare is a defense, not of women and children, but of defense. It is rings of guards who are protecting guards. If you want to be safe in the next war, join the Air Force. Volunteer. Don’t be a civilian by any stretch of the imagination. You are in for it. You are going to get it in the neck as a civilian. Join the Air Force. It’s a safe place. The civilian is the main object of attack.

But so what we do, we can see our own inner characters built up in caricature on the political level, you see: defending, defending, defending. Walls around walls around walls. And that’s all that’s being defended are the defenses. So this is a colossal waste of energy. What it is doing in effect, you see, is putting energy into resistance. And this is against the nature of mammals, but more in the nature of mollusks. Mollusks live inside shells, and consequently, to have a hard shell like a turtle or a crab or a lobster, requires a great energy to make the shell. The mammal works the other way around, because the mammal has the bony structure in the middle and the soft on the outside. And this gives the mammal a biological advantage over the mollusk, because the mammal gets the message quicker because it has a sensitive skin. So it can get out of the way. Whereas the mollusk doesn’t get the message so fast, and something has to clobber on it—bang, like this, you see—but it has the hard shell to resist. But on the whole, the victory goes to man. And why we don’t wear armor in battle anymore. That was given up. It was a bad system. A knight in full armor was an impossibly hopeless thing because he was so unmaneuverable. Do you remember in the movie of Henry V? The way those French knights were hoisted by cranes and put on their horses? Then the idea was they had a lance, and once they got going they could go smash through anything, you see? But they could only—there was one shot to them, and that was it. So to be quick on your feet and sensitive, see, is more advantageous.

So then, once you stop the game of protection, you make psychic energy available for all sorts of things. And so a person who is, in other words, not worried about what’s going to happen—to me, to you, to the destiny of the universe—because nothing can finally happen, because you are what there is; and what there is is always there, only it undergoes transformations, fortunately—he doesn’t become unconcerned. He doesn’t become creatively impoverished. Because, on the contrary, his energies—which have been dissipated in protecting himself—become available for everything else.

And it is for this reason that the Mahayana philosophy became the enormous culturally creative force that it has been in the Far East. All the great art forms—whether they be sculpture, whether they be painting, whether it be ceramics, whether it be architecture—in China and in Japan are effectively Buddhist. Now, we say: well, why didn’t they create public sewage systems, hospitals, adequate food for everybody, and so on, instead? Well, the answer is quite simple. That if they could have, they would have. But they didn’t have the essential keys to produce that kind of a culture.

Now, a very funny thing happened. The main reason why the West produced the Industrial Revolution was that it got hold of the idea of a machine. That is to say, it thought of the universe and of nature as a constructed mechanical system. The Hindus and the Chinese never had that idea; not to any important extent. But through the ideas of Descartes and of Newton and so on. But these all, in a way, go back to Christianity and Judaism with their image of the world as something created by a great technician. When you have thought about the world as a machine, then you say: let’s take it apart and see how it’s made. And you analyze it. Then you say: well, you could put it together in another way, couldn’t you? We could improve on this see? And so all this idea of thinking about the world mechanically underlies the skill of the West in changing the face of the Earth and in making technological improvements.

Now, here comes the joke about the whole thing. The Chinese didn’t do this. The Japanese are just beginning to do it and so on. But we, having done this, realized that there’s more to it than that. That the world is not indefinitely alterable. That, in other words, the whole scheme of life is not so constructed that it has infinitely replaceable parts, and if something goes wrong, we just put in a new one. You know, go to the doctor and you’ll get a new heart when yours wears out. And then they’ll give you a new brain made of some kind of a plastic thing. And by the time you’re 200 years old, there won’t be any of you left that you had before—but there isn’t anyhow. You know? You’re being altered the whole time by nature. So who’s you? Well, you’re just who you say you are. You’re a pattern of behavior. Although all the parts change, you go on.

But the thing is this: what becomes immensely important for our culture—having learned the mechanical way of changing the face of nature, and having been able to teach this to all the so-called backward peoples of the world—there’s still something we need to know. And that is: you cannot make a change at one point without making it at all the others. Because the world is not really a system of separate bits. Everything in it goes together. This point of view is preserved for us by the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus. And that is the thing that we, having developed our technology, most urgently need to know. That, in other words, real compassion and real concern for the welfare of all beings may be not at all represented by quick interference to clean up a certain problem. In the long run, the very long run, the immediate amelioration of the pain can be more disastrous than letting things alone.

Now, of course, you can’t actually let anything alone. As I said this morning, to know about something changes it. Your very effect of looking at something alters what you’re looking at. The fact that I am looking at you has an effect on you. You’re looking at me has an effect on me. I can’t help it. There are the most subtle interchanges going on between us and between ourselves, and [???] where I sit on this chair is altering the chair. Everything is in a state of being interfered with by the slightest gestures and thoughts that I make.

However, we need to become sensitive to just exactly that. That we are not, in other words, living in a world which is just so much material around us to be used. It isn’t just the kind of—like, you could say, “Well, I live in a house, and the house is made of wood, and we could knock it around this way and that, but it’s after all only a house, and it has no feelings. Not like skin, flesh, and bone.” It is like skin and flesh and bone! You see, if you really understand the external world, it is your body.

So then, the philosophy of the Mahayana calls the world the Trikāya. Trikāya means “three bodies.” It’s all kāya. Everything in every direction is called the buddhakāya, see? The body of Buddha. It’s all yours, and you’re it. Now, they look at this in under three aspects. First of all, nirmāṇakāya means the “transformed body,” or the “transforming body,” and that is what you call the material world. That is the constantly changing existence of forms. Nāmarūpa means “name-form,” or “naming forming,” and all that is the aspect that we call everyday life. Then, as it were, on the other extreme is what’s called dharmakāya. Dharma meaning in this case the ultimate reality, the śūnyatā, the tathātā aspect of things, which is beyond all differentiations and also beyond all non-differentiation. Neither one nor many, but inconceivable just for the same reason that the teeth are unbiteable. What there is, the fundamental thing that we are, you are, everything is, that’s the dharmakāya.

Then what comes in between? They call it saṃbhogakāya. Sam means “total,” bhoga means “bliss.” And so this is called the “enjoyment body.” Now this is the secret, you see. Wake up, wake up, wake up. This universe is having a ball, and it wouldn’t go on if it weren’t. Every system that doesn’t work and that isn’t having a ball commits suicide. And this universe has been an unconscionable long time dying. Just as you can realize—supposing you are hating somebody, or you’ve got a grievance, and you suddenly catch yourself in the realization that you enjoy enormously having this grievance, you are nursing the grievance. You notice you wake up and find: I am absolutely out of my mind having a bad time. See? It’s the great thing. It gives you meaning, it gives you purpose in life, it gives you an identity. So behind everything—especially if this becomes clear the moment you let go—you realize that existence is an expression of joy, bliss, saṃbhogakāya. And hence the availability of immense energy for anybody who sees this.