Really and truly, a human building is no more nor less artificial than a bird’s nest.
It’s as to act without feeling that your actions are separate from nature. When you feel that everything you do is simply part of the course of things, then the way in which you do things is changed.
Sometimes, when you sit and do nothing, you avoid making very serious mistakes which would have arisen if you had acted prematurely; if you had done something about it. I’ve practiced this inactivity of this kind for many years and have always been accused of being lucky. Because when I should have done something and been up and at it, I just went and sat and did nothing. And then, when it turned out all right, this is terrible! Just like—no, I know you haven’t said that. That’s why I’m still married to you!
Listen to these contradictions, these paradoxes: the “sophisticated primitivity,” “controlled accident,” where, you see, man and nature are really collaborating. Man as the controller, the reasoner, the logical being, and yet at the same time not ruining life by making it all logic and all control. To have logic and to have control—that is to say, in short: to have order—you have to have randomness. Because where there is no randomness, order cannot manifest itself.
It’s often thought that Eastern philosophy is against individuality. And this is not true. The unity of man in the universe is not a loss, or a merging, of personality in something impersonal. It’s more like the fact that, when individuality, when personality, is known and experienced as an expression of the whole cosmos, then the person becomes more individual, not less individual. But he becomes individual in a non-strident way.
In Buddhism one would not say so much “poverty” as one would say “simplicity:” not going without, not clinging to things because it’s good for you, but because it is actually the happiest way to live. Because nothing is more terrifying than the state of chronic anxiety which one has if you are subject to the illusion that something or other in life could be held onto and safeguarded. And nothing can. So the acceptance of everything flowing away is absolutely basic to freedom; to being an unsui: a cloud-water person who drifts like cloud and flows like water.
It’s likewise inhuman not to have the paradise fantasy of the mysterious place around the corner, just over the crest of the hill, just behind the island in the distance. You see? Because that place is really the big joke. That’s you. That’s why you have found that, at the end of the line, when you get through the last torii and up the last stairway, you are liable to be confronted with a mirror. And so everybody is seeking, seeking, seeking, seeking, seeking for that thing that you’ve got to have, you see? Well, you got it! But nobody’s going to believe this. But there it is: the real thing that you are is the paradise land that you’re looking for at the end of the line. And it’s far, far more reliable than any kind of an external scene which you could love, and cling to, and hold on to.