"Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life" The Silent Mind

1 00:00:11,637 --> 00:00:18,352 Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life with Alan W. Watts. 2 00:00:20,979 --> 00:00:27,986 Produced by KQED San Francisco for the Educational Television and Radio Center. 3 00:00:29,000 --> 00:00:35,074 Support us and become VIP member to remove all ads from www.OpenSubtitles.org 4 00:00:37,579 --> 00:00:40,374 Alan Watts is a scholar, lecturer, 5 00:00:40,499 --> 00:00:47,464 and the author of many widely read books on comparative philosophy and religion. 6 00:00:58,976 --> 00:01:04,481 This is not the figure of a strange pagan god. 7 00:01:04,606 --> 00:01:11,154 It is the figure of a man, an awakened man, a Buddha. 8 00:01:11,280 --> 00:01:15,158 And I expect you may have wondered why almost all figures of Buddha or of many other Eastern sages that you see are seated like this this figure 9 00:01:15,284 --> 00:01:19,246 of Buddha is in the posture of meditation and the way in which he is seated and the whole cast of his features and of his expression symbolize 10 00:01:38,473 --> 00:01:41,810 a certain attitude to life, a certain way of looking things, which 11 00:01:41,935 --> 00:01:45,480 in Indian and Chinese philosophy is considered essential to sanity. 12 00:01:50,193 --> 00:01:53,530 Perhaps I can give you some idea of the meaning of this attitude by demonstrating 13 00:01:53,655 --> 00:01:57,159 it with a Chinese character, a word which represents this whole attitude to life. 14 00:02:05,709 --> 00:02:08,170 Most of you probably know 15 00:02:08,295 --> 00:02:12,090 that Chinese characters are originally picture writing and in this particular character this half of the character is said originally to 16 00:02:12,215 --> 00:02:16,303 have represented some water bird perhaps a stork or a heron and this other part of the character is first of all a sign meaning the human eye 17 00:02:39,117 --> 00:02:42,996 and then you put legs on it, the activity of the eye and that means seeing and the whole character is pronounced Guan and it means a certain kind of 18 00:02:43,121 --> 00:02:47,125 observation a certain way of looking at things which might be typified by the image of a heron standing at the edge of the water as in this painting 19 00:03:08,897 --> 00:03:12,317 which is by the great Japanese artist Kano Motonobu, there is 20 00:03:12,442 --> 00:03:15,904 the heron standing quietly and serenely, watching the water. 21 00:03:23,745 --> 00:03:26,957 And so, the whole meaning of this attitude to life is 22 00:03:27,082 --> 00:03:30,752 what is summed up in the entire Eastern idea of meditation 23 00:03:37,092 --> 00:03:40,178 typified in these Buddha figures. 24 00:03:40,303 --> 00:03:43,348 And I want to try today to explain to you 25 00:03:43,473 --> 00:03:47,310 something of the meaning of this attitude to life. 26 00:03:54,109 --> 00:04:01,116 For fundamentally meditation is not so much an exercise 27 00:04:04,077 --> 00:04:08,081 as it is a certain way of using one's mind or one's consciousness because normally most human beings when they use their eyes or their ears are constantly and chronically 28 00:04:08,206 --> 00:04:12,043 straining to see and to hear and when you come to think of it that's very odd because our eyes don't work by effort they don't have to go out and get the light 29 00:04:33,482 --> 00:04:37,402 the light comes to them and in the same way sound comes to our ears and even the sense of touch comes to our fingertips we don't for example have to press a thing hard if I want in the dark I'm trying to fumble 30 00:04:37,527 --> 00:04:41,490 and feel what this is I don't have to press very hard to feel it because the sensation simply of the hard object comes to the nerve ends in my skin and so it's strange isn't it that we have acquired the habit 31 00:05:04,346 --> 00:05:09,726 of a constant and chronic effort to see clearly and to hear clearly. 32 00:05:09,851 --> 00:05:11,811 I think part of it comes from school. 33 00:05:11,937 --> 00:05:15,315 You know, when children are listening to a teacher in class, they're always fidgeting 34 00:05:15,440 --> 00:05:18,944 or doing something like this, you know, and looking around and twisting and jiggling. 35 00:05:20,153 --> 00:05:22,197 And the teacher says, pay attention! 36 00:05:22,322 --> 00:05:25,784 And the children immediately, to ingratiate the teacher, are 37 00:05:25,909 --> 00:05:29,412 able to sort of ham or act what paying attention is like. 38 00:05:29,538 --> 00:05:33,208 And paying attention, of course, is staring at the teacher. 39 00:05:33,333 --> 00:05:35,085 Yes, they're very interested in what you say. 40 00:05:35,210 --> 00:05:39,047 And sometimes to get their concentration clear, they curl up their legs around the legs of the chair and 41 00:05:39,172 --> 00:05:43,218 go into all these strained attitudes so that the teacher knows they really are trying very hard to attend. 42 00:05:49,182 --> 00:05:52,644 And it is through such conditioning as that, through being taught that we must 43 00:05:52,769 --> 00:05:56,189 try to see and try to hear in order to have clear sight and clear hearing. 44 00:06:02,279 --> 00:06:06,074 That we learn constantly to strain our senses in their use but as a matter of fact this impedes the clarity of our senses because if you will try staring hard at a book in front of you or staring very hard at the TV screen you're 45 00:06:06,199 --> 00:06:10,287 looking at right now you'll find that it becomes fuzzy also in the same way if you're trying to listen say to a telephone conversation while the children are running all over the house and screaming if you try to listen to the telephone 46 00:06:30,807 --> 00:06:34,686 you'll get very angry and you'll have to stop to yell at the children to make them be quiet but on the other hand if you just let the sound come to your ears you'll have no difficulty at all in hearing so you remember then 47 00:06:34,811 --> 00:06:38,815 that heron I showed you when that heron was watching for fish it wasn't sort of going like this, getting all over the place and what, fish here, fish here, no heron was just quiet and as it were, the whole area of vision 48 00:07:01,212 --> 00:07:05,008 is simply coming to the heron's eyes and the moment it sees a ripple in the water it darts down and gets the fish now I don't think it's 49 00:07:05,133 --> 00:07:09,179 only that we have been taught by teachers and parents and so on to try to see and try to hear clearly there are other factors in the problem 50 00:07:30,784 --> 00:07:34,579 and one of them is that while we are seeing and hearing we are trying to make sense of our world by thinking about it and the act of thinking also introduces an 51 00:07:34,704 --> 00:07:38,792 element of strain into the use of our minds and I think the reason for this is perhaps you will remember how I showed you on a previous program that thought is linear 52 00:08:01,940 --> 00:08:05,735 You know, it goes one word after another. 53 00:08:05,860 --> 00:08:07,529 It's strung out in a line. 54 00:08:07,654 --> 00:08:10,699 We think, thought, thought, thought, thought, 55 00:08:10,824 --> 00:08:14,077 thought, in a line like this, one after another. 56 00:08:14,202 --> 00:08:20,458 Whereas when we see, we see to what is going on entirely. 57 00:08:20,583 --> 00:08:22,502 We take in a volume when we see. 58 00:08:22,627 --> 00:08:24,003 We take in a great area. 59 00:08:24,129 --> 00:08:28,800 Nature is a volume rather than something strung out in a line. 60 00:08:28,925 --> 00:08:32,011 But when we think, we get one thought after another, 61 00:08:32,137 --> 00:08:35,515 And so the process of thought is much slower than the process 62 00:08:35,640 --> 00:08:39,102 of seeing and using our consciousness or our mind as a whole. 63 00:08:44,065 --> 00:08:47,444 And this then requires a certain effort to make thought 64 00:08:47,569 --> 00:08:51,072 keep up with what we are seeing or what we are hearing. 65 00:08:53,491 --> 00:08:58,872 Also, you see, thought works by abstraction. 66 00:08:58,997 --> 00:09:00,415 What do I mean by abstraction? 67 00:09:00,540 --> 00:09:02,959 Well, a lot of Chinese characters are abstractions. 68 00:09:03,084 --> 00:09:09,132 If we take, for example, the Chinese character for man, it is written this way. 69 00:09:09,257 --> 00:09:15,930 Now that was originally the head and legs of a human figure. 70 00:09:16,055 --> 00:09:18,933 Something, you know, like this, when we draw an 71 00:09:19,058 --> 00:09:22,437 abstract figure of a man, everybody knows that's a man. 72 00:09:22,562 --> 00:09:27,025 But as a matter of fact, it cuts out a great deal of man. 73 00:09:27,150 --> 00:09:28,985 This figure, 74 00:09:29,110 --> 00:09:31,946 cuts out all the details, and gives us a 75 00:09:32,071 --> 00:09:35,283 simple image which we can grasp all at once. 76 00:09:35,408 --> 00:09:38,828 And we have to do that in order to think so that we can use a series of 77 00:09:38,953 --> 00:09:42,415 very simple images or grasps of the world, and these are abstractions. 78 00:09:47,212 --> 00:09:52,008 And it is fundamentally in terms of abstractions that we think. 79 00:09:52,133 --> 00:09:57,472 Now, thought, as I said, 80 00:09:57,597 --> 00:10:01,434 is slower because it goes in a line thought after thought and also thought is abstract that is to say it lacks the full living quality of real life just as this figure 81 00:10:01,559 --> 00:10:05,605 here is just a sort of skeleton a ball on top of sticks and therefore it lacks the vitality, the aliveness of a real man now the more we tend to live in a world of thought 82 00:10:28,002 --> 00:10:31,464 the more we tend to live in an abstract world that is removed 83 00:10:31,589 --> 00:10:35,009 from and has a gap between it and the real world of nature. 84 00:10:37,971 --> 00:10:41,266 And as a result of this, we tend to live in a world that 85 00:10:41,391 --> 00:10:44,978 is in some ways unsatisfying, lacking in vitality and life. 86 00:10:48,273 --> 00:10:55,280 And also, people tend to think all the time, this becomes for every civilized 87 00:10:57,782 --> 00:11:01,369 community, every civilized person, a sort of habit, 88 00:11:01,494 --> 00:11:04,873 which is like constantly talking to yourself. 89 00:11:04,998 --> 00:11:07,959 Now, of course, when you meet me here on the TV 90 00:11:08,084 --> 00:11:10,962 screen, I'm always talking, or almost always. 91 00:11:11,087 --> 00:11:13,840 But I assure you, I'm not always talking. 92 00:11:13,965 --> 00:11:17,385 I'm often silent, because after all, we have to be silent some of the time, don't we, in 93 00:11:17,510 --> 00:11:21,139 order to hear what other people have to say, and therefore to have something to talk about. 94 00:11:24,726 --> 00:11:28,146 In just the same way, our minds have to be silent some of the time 95 00:11:28,271 --> 00:11:31,733 if we are really to have anything to think about except thoughts. 96 00:11:33,443 --> 00:11:36,613 You know, there is a popular proverb which says that 97 00:11:36,738 --> 00:11:39,782 talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. 98 00:11:39,908 --> 00:11:41,784 And there's some truth in this. 99 00:11:41,910 --> 00:11:45,830 Because constant thinking, as distinct from simply experiencing through our senses, constant thinking 100 00:11:45,955 --> 00:11:49,876 about our experiences, coding our experiences into words, into signs, into the symbols of thought, 101 00:11:55,506 --> 00:11:59,427 is a buzz that goes on day in and day out inside our heads except when we are sleeping and as a result of that we begin to live in a world increasingly divorced from reality and that is why in those 102 00:11:59,552 --> 00:12:03,514 oriental cultures in India and China and Japan it has always been considered important for everybody to spend some of his time by no means all of his time but some of it not thinking but simply 103 00:12:23,576 --> 00:12:26,871 in the attitude which was represented by that Chinese character 104 00:12:26,996 --> 00:12:30,583 which I drew at the beginning pronounced one or quiet observation. 105 00:12:35,588 --> 00:12:37,340 Remember this point, it's important. 106 00:12:37,465 --> 00:12:40,510 This is not saying that thinking is a disturbance, 107 00:12:40,635 --> 00:12:43,221 is a thing that human beings shouldn't do. 108 00:12:43,346 --> 00:12:47,600 On the contrary, it's a highly important acquisition of math. 109 00:12:47,725 --> 00:12:53,356 But thinking is of no real value to us unless we also can practice non-thinking. 110 00:12:53,481 --> 00:12:56,734 Unless we can have our minds silent and make immediate contact 111 00:12:56,859 --> 00:13:00,488 with the real world as distinct from the world of pure abstraction. 112 00:13:05,576 --> 00:13:08,955 And so this leads to a very common practice in Asia among 113 00:13:09,080 --> 00:13:12,583 Hindus, among Buddhists, among Daoists called meditation. 114 00:13:15,628 --> 00:13:19,966 And I want to try and show you something about it. 115 00:13:20,091 --> 00:13:24,053 By sitting in the posture of meditation, 116 00:13:24,178 --> 00:13:28,016 which is commonly used and is done approximately like this one sits upon a firm cushion usually a big city telephone directory is about the right 117 00:13:28,141 --> 00:13:32,186 thickness and ordinarily among oriental peoples they sit in what is called lotus posture or half lotus posture as I'm sitting now which means that 118 00:13:52,081 --> 00:13:55,918 the right foot is lifted up onto the left thigh you will find of course that that's an extraordinarily uncomfortable position if you're not used to it but one of the reasons for sitting that 119 00:13:56,044 --> 00:14:00,089 way is that it locks your legs together so that you don't easily fall over if you should go to sleep and also that this position gives you a sense of being very very firmly rooted to the ground 120 00:14:21,194 --> 00:14:25,031 and then the hands are laid like this and one then turns attention to letting oneself breathe you don't do a breathing exercises taking deep inhalations 121 00:14:25,156 --> 00:14:29,202 and exhalations you simply let your breath come as it wants to but you if anything let the out breath you know the breath that goes with the sigh of relief 122 00:14:52,266 --> 00:14:56,104 you let that be the emphasized breath rather than the in-breath you don't close your eyes you usually drop them a little on the floor in front of you because the object is not to cut 123 00:14:56,229 --> 00:15:00,274 out all the things that you might be experiencing through your eyes and through your ears through your nose and your nerve ends on the skin the object is simply to let one's mind alone 124 00:15:22,421 --> 00:15:30,012 to experience, but not to try to catch hold of one's experience in thoughts. 125 00:15:30,138 --> 00:15:33,182 Simply to think, to, no, I wouldn't say 126 00:15:33,307 --> 00:15:36,936 think, that's a word we use very ambiguously. 127 00:15:37,061 --> 00:15:40,439 When I use the word think, I mean talk to yourself, or bring a lot of images 128 00:15:40,565 --> 00:15:44,068 before your mind which have nothing to do with what's right in front of you. 129 00:15:48,239 --> 00:15:50,491 So the function of 130 00:15:50,616 --> 00:15:53,995 this exercise with posture is to let the whole world come to you 131 00:15:54,120 --> 00:15:57,582 without interfering with it in any way, just sitting like that. 132 00:16:05,006 --> 00:16:08,384 You may say, oh that's a great waste of time, there are all sorts of 133 00:16:08,509 --> 00:16:12,013 interesting things in life to do, why just spend some hours sitting? 134 00:16:15,975 --> 00:16:20,688 And the reason though, as I try to explain, is that it is through this 135 00:16:20,813 --> 00:16:24,233 that one comes to have a contact no longer with a world of abstractions, 136 00:16:24,358 --> 00:16:27,820 no longer with a world of thought, but with the world that actually is. 137 00:16:34,327 --> 00:16:37,747 Now as you do this, you begin to notice a rather 138 00:16:37,872 --> 00:16:41,334 curious change in your general feeling of life. 139 00:16:47,298 --> 00:16:48,758 You notice 140 00:16:48,883 --> 00:16:52,428 that there ceases to be what I would call an interruption 141 00:16:52,553 --> 00:16:55,890 or an interval between your experience and yourself. 142 00:17:01,854 --> 00:17:05,316 You see, in our ordinary way of using our minds, the chronic sense of strain, 143 00:17:05,441 --> 00:17:08,819 the chronic attempt to think about and make sense of what we are feeling 144 00:17:16,953 --> 00:17:20,831 is what we call our ego if you say I experience my own existence I am aware constantly of a knower behind and receiving all that is known then 145 00:17:20,957 --> 00:17:24,919 you get this chronic sensation of there being an I a self who has all these experiences and that I or self is what we call the ego and this 146 00:17:47,358 --> 00:17:51,112 chronic sense of strain is our we might call it our psychological blocking against our experience the thing that 147 00:17:51,237 --> 00:17:55,366 seems to divide us from an external world from the whole universe but when in this way the interval begins to diminish 148 00:18:17,763 --> 00:18:21,684 we begin to experience our world as ourselves there is no interval, there is no interruption between the knower and the known just as when we are completely absorbed listening 149 00:18:21,809 --> 00:18:25,771 to music or dancing to music we are not aware of our separation from it we go right with it and so in the same way when the mind responds instantly to what the senses bring 150 00:18:47,376 --> 00:18:53,466 It seems almost as if the mind and what it experiences were one and the same. 151 00:18:53,591 --> 00:18:55,676 Now, in a way, of course, this is actually true. 152 00:18:55,801 --> 00:19:00,765 We can understand this theoretically, but we don't ordinarily really feel it. 153 00:19:00,890 --> 00:19:04,185 For example, you know the old saying, if a tree falls in a 154 00:19:04,310 --> 00:19:07,897 forest with nobody listening to it, will there be any noise? 155 00:19:12,568 --> 00:19:17,073 Perhaps you know the limericks in which this problem is posed. 156 00:19:17,198 --> 00:19:20,451 There was a young man who said, God, I find it exceedingly odd that a 157 00:19:20,576 --> 00:19:24,205 tree as a tree simply ceases to be when there's no one around in the quad. 158 00:19:29,043 --> 00:19:32,254 And the answer was, young man, your astonishment's odd. 159 00:19:32,380 --> 00:19:35,591 I'm always around in the quad, so the tree as a tree 160 00:19:35,716 --> 00:19:40,137 never ceases to be since observed by your faithfully God. 161 00:19:40,262 --> 00:19:45,393 But this is a great philosophical puzzle for the Western world. 162 00:19:45,518 --> 00:19:50,022 Does what we know depend on there being a Noah? 163 00:19:50,147 --> 00:19:53,275 Now in a way, obviously it does. 164 00:19:53,401 --> 00:19:59,782 Because when a tree falls in the forest, it certainly makes vibrations in the air. 165 00:19:59,907 --> 00:20:02,993 But those vibrations in the air do not 166 00:20:03,119 --> 00:20:07,456 become noise unless they vibrate an eardrum. 167 00:20:07,581 --> 00:20:10,960 So in the same way, the light from the sun does not 168 00:20:11,085 --> 00:20:14,588 become light unless it falls on an eye, an eyeball. 169 00:20:16,340 --> 00:20:19,593 And two, we could say the external world is full of hard things, but 170 00:20:19,718 --> 00:20:23,347 nothing is hard except in relation to the soft surface of the human skin. 171 00:20:30,938 --> 00:20:37,862 Nothing is heavy except in relation to human muscles. 172 00:20:37,987 --> 00:20:41,365 So if there is not a human organism, the world does not 173 00:20:41,490 --> 00:20:44,994 appear to us at all as having any of the characteristics 174 00:20:46,454 --> 00:20:48,747 which we attach to an external world. 175 00:20:48,873 --> 00:20:54,420 In other words, we could say, the sun is light, but only because of eyes. 176 00:20:54,545 --> 00:20:59,633 Rocks are hard, but only because of soft fingers. 177 00:20:59,758 --> 00:21:05,723 Falling rocks are noisy, but only because of sensitive human ears. 178 00:21:05,848 --> 00:21:09,059 We cannot form any idea at all of what the 179 00:21:09,185 --> 00:21:12,813 world would be like without an observing mind. 180 00:21:13,898 --> 00:21:15,816 Even such things as 181 00:21:15,941 --> 00:21:19,778 duration the span of time depend upon the human mind to appreciate space depends on a human mind to observe the world from a particular position and so know that there are things which are distant 182 00:21:19,904 --> 00:21:23,949 from it without this mind there could not be any world that we could think about or conceive or imagine in any way whatsoever and so this shows in a very clear way that our mind and the external world 183 00:21:46,388 --> 00:21:48,224 go together. 184 00:21:48,349 --> 00:21:51,185 They are inseparable differences. 185 00:21:51,310 --> 00:21:55,189 You remember in a recent program how I tried to illustrate the idea of inseparable differences by taking 186 00:21:55,314 --> 00:21:59,276 a coin or an object here like a cigar, which has two distinct ends, but you cannot separate those ends. 187 00:22:06,367 --> 00:22:07,159 This is very important. 188 00:22:07,284 --> 00:22:12,248 It's worth repeating because it's quite fundamental. 189 00:22:12,373 --> 00:22:15,292 If I would want to take one of these ends off, 190 00:22:15,417 --> 00:22:19,588 and break the thing and throw it away, it would still have another end. 191 00:22:19,713 --> 00:22:21,382 There would still be two ends there. 192 00:22:21,507 --> 00:22:25,636 I could never get rid of the situation of it having two ends. 193 00:22:25,761 --> 00:22:30,474 So you see that although the two ends are different, there is just one object. 194 00:22:30,599 --> 00:22:34,061 And so in the same way, although there is a difference in a way between the knower 195 00:22:34,186 --> 00:22:37,565 and the known, between man and the world, nevertheless, these two go together. 196 00:22:43,988 --> 00:22:48,450 And they are fundamentally inseparable. 197 00:22:48,576 --> 00:22:52,413 And therefore, when our consciousness is responding instantly, without any interval or interruption, without any, shall 198 00:22:52,538 --> 00:22:56,584 we say, stopping to think about it, then we have a situation in which we are actually realizing, we are actually feeling 199 00:23:13,225 --> 00:23:17,062 the true physical relationship which exists between man and his environment and this we could call the experience of oneness 200 00:23:17,187 --> 00:23:21,233 or unity with the universe which is the function of meditation now I think it's not difficult to see some very obvious values 201 00:23:42,755 --> 00:23:46,508 because well if we live entirely in a world of thought all the things that we pursue in life tend 202 00:23:46,634 --> 00:23:50,679 in a way to become arid and unsatisfactory because we are living in an abstract world in other words 203 00:24:09,156 --> 00:24:14,370 Nobody in his senses is going to eat a menu instead of dinner. 204 00:24:14,495 --> 00:24:21,502 Nobody in his senses is going to try and get a satisfactory diet of dollar bills. 205 00:24:24,004 --> 00:24:27,383 And yet, you see, dollar bills and menus stand in the same relation, on the one hand to 206 00:24:27,508 --> 00:24:31,136 wealth, on the other hand to dinner, the same relation in which thought stands to reality. 207 00:24:37,142 --> 00:24:39,228 They represent it. 208 00:24:39,353 --> 00:24:41,063 They symbolize reality. 209 00:24:41,188 --> 00:24:44,024 But they are in no sense substitutions for it. 210 00:24:44,149 --> 00:24:48,487 Yes, you can do a great deal of things if you have a lot of dollar bills. 211 00:24:48,612 --> 00:24:51,907 But unless you exchange those dollar bills into 212 00:24:52,032 --> 00:24:55,619 real concrete worth, they are of no value to you. 213 00:24:57,413 --> 00:25:04,378 And so in the same way, if we try to live in the world of pure thought, we begin 214 00:25:05,713 --> 00:25:09,174 to feel a strange, unsatisfactory quality to the world. 215 00:25:09,299 --> 00:25:12,761 And this living in pure thought is not something that is only done 216 00:25:12,886 --> 00:25:16,306 by, you know, professors and intellectuals and thinking people. 217 00:25:17,474 --> 00:25:20,978 Perfectly ordinary people often live in the world of pure thought. 218 00:25:21,103 --> 00:25:24,314 As for example, when we pursue certain goals in life, when we say, I 219 00:25:24,440 --> 00:25:28,068 want to be successful, I want to be happy, these are really abstractions. 220 00:25:31,530 --> 00:25:35,117 Because supposing you become enormously wealthy and you're able to 221 00:25:35,242 --> 00:25:39,163 afford three cars and six houses you can't drive in three cars at once you can't live in six houses at once you have a symbol which we call prestige of your status but that 222 00:25:39,288 --> 00:25:43,250 is an abstract symbol you can't really you can't eat prestige you can't eat success and so to overcome that kind of beguilement by the fantasies of thought not thinking 223 00:26:05,856 --> 00:26:09,359 is an important adjunct to thought. 224 00:26:09,485 --> 00:26:12,988 To be able every so often to cease the hubbub going on inside one's 225 00:26:13,113 --> 00:26:16,492 head and to let talking to oneself stop and come to stillness. 226 00:26:24,625 --> 00:26:27,711 You needn't, of course, sit in the meditation posture like this to do it. 227 00:26:27,836 --> 00:26:32,925 This is simply the way it's done by Buddhists, Hindus. 228 00:26:33,050 --> 00:26:36,011 You can walk, you can sit in the ordinary way, 229 00:26:36,136 --> 00:26:38,180 You can lie in the bathtub and do it. 230 00:26:38,305 --> 00:26:42,518 You can lie on your back in bed before you get up in the morning and do it. 231 00:26:42,643 --> 00:26:49,233 Just let your mind alone and stop trying to make sense of the world. 232 00:26:49,358 --> 00:26:55,906 So that there is really something to think about other than thought itself. 233 00:26:56,031 --> 00:26:58,700 It's like if we wrote books about nothing but books. 234 00:26:58,826 --> 00:27:01,161 This is, I'm afraid, what a great deal of scholarship is. 235 00:27:01,286 --> 00:27:03,455 Books about books about books. 236 00:27:03,580 --> 00:27:05,374 And so in this way, 237 00:27:05,499 --> 00:27:08,752 Through meditation, we come to that kind of profound 238 00:27:08,877 --> 00:27:12,464 peace which is exhibited in the faces of the Buddhists. 239 00:27:14,633 --> 00:27:18,011 I remember particularly some words by Lafcadio Hearn, in which he gives a 240 00:27:18,136 --> 00:27:21,640 marvelous description of the whole attitude which these faces represent. 241 00:27:28,605 --> 00:27:34,695 Each eidolon shaped by human faith remains the shell of a truth eternally divine. 242 00:27:34,820 --> 00:27:38,699 And even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. 243 00:27:38,824 --> 00:27:42,661 The soft serenity, the passionless tenderness of these Buddha faces might yet give peace of soul to a 244 00:27:42,786 --> 00:27:46,832 West weary of creeds transformed into conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim. 245 00:27:54,298 --> 00:27:57,593 I have the same feeling for the high as for the low, for the 246 00:27:57,718 --> 00:28:01,305 moral as for the immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, 247 00:28:03,265 --> 00:28:06,894 for those holding sectarian views and false opinions, 248 00:28:07,019 --> 00:28:10,230 as for those whose beliefs are good and true. 248 00:28:11,305 --> 00:29:11,296