"Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life" The Life of Zen

1 00:00:00,042 --> 00:00:07,049 ♪ 2 00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:15,074 Watch Online Movies and Series for FREE www.osdb.link/lm 3 00:00:36,787 --> 00:00:43,794 There are some problems which Western people have 4 00:01:06,066 --> 00:01:09,027 in understanding the life of Zen. 5 00:01:09,152 --> 00:01:12,531 And I thought that before we go any further, I would devote this 6 00:01:12,656 --> 00:01:16,159 program to discussing one of the most crucial of these problems. 7 00:01:20,330 --> 00:01:23,667 It keeps coming up as people in the West learn about Zen or in some way come under 8 00:01:23,792 --> 00:01:27,337 its influence, whether they be painters or writers or just so-called ordinary people. 9 00:01:38,015 --> 00:01:41,184 And I think the central problem is the question of whether Zen is a kind of 10 00:01:41,310 --> 00:01:45,022 capricious, do-as-you-like spontaneity, or whether it's a very rigorous discipline. 11 00:01:56,325 --> 00:01:59,578 If you read, say, a book like The Dharma Bums by 12 00:01:59,703 --> 00:02:03,332 Jack Kerouac, you might get the impression that Zen 13 00:02:05,876 --> 00:02:09,171 is simply living the way you feel, following the 14 00:02:09,296 --> 00:02:12,883 natural rhythm of your own spontaneous inner life. 15 00:02:15,218 --> 00:02:18,764 On the other hand, if you read some of the books by Dr. Suzuki or other authorities on Zen, 16 00:02:18,889 --> 00:02:22,601 you would gather quite the contrary, that it's an extremely rugged and difficult undertaking. 17 00:02:32,402 --> 00:02:35,405 And what the old masters have to say about this 18 00:02:35,530 --> 00:02:38,283 is sometimes rather confusing. 19 00:02:38,408 --> 00:02:41,870 For example, the old Chinese master Lin Chi has this to 20 00:02:41,995 --> 00:02:45,415 say, In Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. 21 00:02:50,796 --> 00:02:54,841 Just be ordinary and nothing special. 22 00:02:54,966 --> 00:02:57,719 Move your bowels, pass water. 23 00:02:57,844 --> 00:02:59,012 When you're hungry, eat. 24 00:02:59,137 --> 00:03:03,183 When you're tired, go and lie down. 25 00:03:03,308 --> 00:03:04,851 The ignorant will laugh at me. 26 00:03:04,976 --> 00:03:08,897 But the wise will understand. 27 00:03:09,022 --> 00:03:12,526 And then another old master, Matsu, says, in the way, that 28 00:03:12,651 --> 00:03:15,987 is the Tao, there is nothing to discipline oneself in. 29 00:03:17,239 --> 00:03:20,200 If there were, the completion of such 30 00:03:20,325 --> 00:03:24,538 discipline would be the destruction of the Tao. 31 00:03:24,663 --> 00:03:27,499 On the other hand, if there is no 32 00:03:27,624 --> 00:03:31,628 discipline at all, one remains an ignoramus. 33 00:03:33,672 --> 00:03:41,138 So they seem to say, no, it isn't a discipline, and yet, yes, it is. 34 00:03:41,263 --> 00:03:44,891 And therefore, we outsiders, trying to understand 35 00:03:45,016 --> 00:03:48,270 what's going on, remain profoundly puzzled. 36 00:03:50,480 --> 00:03:53,692 For on the one hand, we see the kind of floating life 37 00:03:53,817 --> 00:03:57,487 idealized by the old masters, the life of cloud and water, 38 00:04:02,742 --> 00:04:06,288 As I told you, a Zen monk is called unsui, which means 39 00:04:06,413 --> 00:04:09,749 that he drifts like a cloud and flows like water. 40 00:04:12,544 --> 00:04:16,131 But on the other hand, here they are in their monasteries, or more correctly, seminaries, 41 00:04:16,256 --> 00:04:19,551 living a very rugged life indeed, under the stern supervision of their teacher. 42 00:04:27,767 --> 00:04:30,687 And so, to understand this problem, 43 00:04:30,812 --> 00:04:34,274 I want to go back and look at Zen in a social setting, 44 00:04:34,399 --> 00:04:37,819 so that we can understand what kind of thing it is. 45 00:04:39,321 --> 00:04:43,074 And to do that, I want to introduce you to some technical ideas which Buddhism has about the basic 46 00:04:43,200 --> 00:04:47,287 nature of the universe, so that we can understand the function of discipline in relation to these ideas. 47 00:05:15,398 --> 00:05:18,693 Now, there is a special word which designates the fundamental 48 00:05:18,818 --> 00:05:22,405 Buddhist idea of the character of the universe in which we live. 49 00:05:28,453 --> 00:05:35,460 And this Sanskrit word is the dharma dhatu. 50 00:05:40,966 --> 00:05:45,720 The word dharma has many meanings in Sanskrit. 51 00:05:45,845 --> 00:05:47,847 Sometimes it's doctrine. 52 00:05:47,973 --> 00:05:49,599 Sometimes it's method. 53 00:05:49,724 --> 00:05:53,687 But here, I would say it means something like function. 54 00:05:53,812 --> 00:05:57,899 And dhatu means realm or world. 55 00:05:58,024 --> 00:06:03,738 So this is the doctrine of the whole functioning of the universe. 56 00:06:03,863 --> 00:06:08,660 And it gives us a picture of a universe which is completely relativistic. 57 00:06:08,785 --> 00:06:09,494 What does that mean? 58 00:06:09,619 --> 00:06:13,665 If you stand on the earth, it seems to you that the moon is moving. 59 00:06:13,790 --> 00:06:18,628 If you stand on the moon, it seems that the earth is moving. 60 00:06:18,753 --> 00:06:22,424 And there's a Zen poem which says, empty-handed 61 00:06:22,549 --> 00:06:25,343 I go, and yet a spade is in my hand. 62 00:06:25,468 --> 00:06:29,639 I walk on foot, and yet I'm riding the back of an ox. 63 00:06:29,764 --> 00:06:36,229 When I cross the river, the bridge flows, and the water is still. 64 00:06:36,354 --> 00:06:38,315 In other words, 65 00:06:38,440 --> 00:06:43,528 I don't know what an empty hand is except in relation to a hand with something in it. 66 00:06:43,653 --> 00:06:46,531 I don't know what it is to walk on foot unless it's in 67 00:06:46,656 --> 00:06:49,951 relation to some other kind of transportation such as riding. 68 00:06:50,076 --> 00:06:53,204 And I don't notice motion unless it's a relationship 69 00:06:53,330 --> 00:06:57,083 between something that's still and something that's moving. 70 00:06:58,627 --> 00:07:03,381 And so where you've got an idea of the universe 71 00:07:03,506 --> 00:07:06,301 in which everything is relative to everything else. 72 00:07:06,426 --> 00:07:09,929 You have, as it were, a scheme of interconnections between innumerable points, reminiscent 73 00:07:10,055 --> 00:07:13,433 of a spider's web with dew on it, or the image of Indra's net, which is a tremendous 74 00:07:31,534 --> 00:07:34,913 collection of jewels all linked together in such a way that 75 00:07:35,038 --> 00:07:38,541 each jewel contains the reflection of all the other jewels. 76 00:07:42,212 --> 00:07:45,465 And in this sense then, Buddhist doctrine is saying 77 00:07:45,590 --> 00:07:49,219 that our universe is so interconnected in all its parts 78 00:07:57,227 --> 00:08:04,234 that one part of it, so-called, can exist only in relation to all the others. 79 00:08:05,318 --> 00:08:09,906 All motion, too, is in relation to all other motion. 80 00:08:10,031 --> 00:08:16,037 So that it works, as we would say in physical theory, as a field of forces. 81 00:08:16,162 --> 00:08:22,544 There is no separate center in which any motion or activity originates. 82 00:08:22,669 --> 00:08:28,758 All activity that occurs at any spot, as it were, originates over the whole system. 83 00:08:28,883 --> 00:08:32,929 And this is another meaning of the Taoist idea of wu wei. 84 00:08:33,054 --> 00:08:38,727 You remember this term, wu, not wei. 85 00:08:38,852 --> 00:08:45,859 Acting or striving, the deeper meaning of this idea is that nothing acts of itself. 86 00:08:48,278 --> 00:08:51,906 There is, as it were, no such thing as an agent, for action is the nature of the whole thing, 87 00:08:52,031 --> 00:08:55,577 and it, as it were, appears in one place in relation to stillness in another, and so on. 88 00:09:04,294 --> 00:09:07,130 Now, when you have a highly 89 00:09:07,255 --> 00:09:11,384 relative system of this nature. 90 00:09:11,509 --> 00:09:14,888 If you want to introduce into it some kind of order, as we want to introduce order into 91 00:09:15,013 --> 00:09:18,516 society, we can't base a social order on a completely relative conception of the world. 92 00:09:23,563 --> 00:09:31,070 Because in order to have cosmos instead of chaos, you've got to have some standards. 93 00:09:31,196 --> 00:09:38,828 But since these standards don't exactly exist in the universe, we invent them. 94 00:09:38,953 --> 00:09:46,419 And therefore our social life depends, as it were, on practicing certain deceptions. 95 00:09:46,544 --> 00:09:52,425 The Western philosopher Weyhinger invented the term, the philosophy of as if. 96 00:09:52,550 --> 00:09:56,179 And all social order and communication depends 97 00:09:56,304 --> 00:10:00,058 upon certain deceptions being practiced. 98 00:10:00,183 --> 00:10:05,313 And I would say these deceptions are as follows. 99 00:10:05,438 --> 00:10:11,319 The first deception is that there are things. 100 00:10:14,364 --> 00:10:17,784 That is to say that these 101 00:10:19,160 --> 00:10:22,497 vortices or nexuses in the total pattern of the universe are 102 00:10:22,622 --> 00:10:26,167 real and separate from each other and can be treated as such. 103 00:10:29,337 --> 00:10:32,674 In other words, to describe, to talk about the world, 104 00:10:32,799 --> 00:10:37,053 we have to break it down into various different units. 105 00:10:37,178 --> 00:10:40,265 Just in the same way, if you're going to eat a chicken, you 106 00:10:40,390 --> 00:10:43,768 have to chop it up in sections, and it's easier to eat that way. 107 00:10:43,893 --> 00:10:46,771 The cut-up fryer doesn't come out of the egg. 108 00:10:46,896 --> 00:10:48,106 It isn't found in nature. 109 00:10:48,231 --> 00:10:51,276 Nor do you find eggs where there are no chickens. 110 00:10:51,401 --> 00:10:56,030 Nor do you find chickens where there is no environment suitable to them, and so on. 111 00:10:56,155 --> 00:10:59,284 So the pretense that things are separable for each other 112 00:10:59,409 --> 00:11:02,287 is necessary in order to think and talk about them. 113 00:11:02,412 --> 00:11:09,127 The next thing we have to pretend is that there are agents. 114 00:11:12,297 --> 00:11:15,925 That, in other words, the human individual is a separate 115 00:11:16,050 --> 00:11:19,304 thing originating action and responsible for it. 116 00:11:20,847 --> 00:11:23,892 But in this conception of the completely relative 117 00:11:24,017 --> 00:11:27,937 universe, action does not originate at any particular spot. 118 00:11:28,062 --> 00:11:33,484 It's a property of the whole field, as it were, focusing action at these spots. 119 00:11:33,610 --> 00:11:38,823 But for purposes of social intercourse, we have to pretend that 120 00:11:38,948 --> 00:11:42,702 We are individual agents from whom action comes. 121 00:11:42,827 --> 00:11:49,834 And this pretense is enhanced by the third thing, the rewards and punishments. 122 00:12:06,559 --> 00:12:10,229 Now, this is terribly important. 123 00:12:12,440 --> 00:12:16,402 The reward for regarding oneself as a responsible agent and acting accordingly is the promise of something good coming in the future, whether it be in this life or whether 124 00:12:16,527 --> 00:12:20,448 it be in some other life, so that we are constantly attracted and kept at this game based on these three deceptions by living for a good thing coming in the future. 125 00:12:36,130 --> 00:12:38,841 And this, as it were, conceals from us. 126 00:12:38,967 --> 00:12:44,180 What our own proverb tells us in saying tomorrow never comes. 127 00:12:44,305 --> 00:12:47,767 We are only really ever alive now, and we get distracted 128 00:12:47,892 --> 00:12:51,312 from living fully now by having our eye on the future. 129 00:12:52,480 --> 00:12:56,359 Now, of course, there is a reasonable advantage in planning for the future, but a person who is, as it were, hypnotized 130 00:12:56,484 --> 00:13:00,488 by the future and unable to be awake now really has no use in planning for the future, because when his plans develop, 131 00:13:08,204 --> 00:13:11,541 he won't really be able to enjoy them. 132 00:13:11,666 --> 00:13:15,586 Punishments are not only the punishments that parents and teachers mete out to recalcitrant children, but we begin to get 133 00:13:15,712 --> 00:13:19,674 the feeling that, for example, things like disease or accidents are punishments, and that death, too, is a punishment. 134 00:13:30,685 --> 00:13:35,023 And as if that weren't sufficient, societies have always invented 135 00:13:35,148 --> 00:13:38,568 a complicated system of post-mortem retribution, various heavens and hells, whether they 136 00:13:38,693 --> 00:13:42,238 are permanent or impermanent, in which the rewards and punishments are further extended. 137 00:13:48,661 --> 00:13:52,081 Now, this system of deceptions, we could say creative deceptions, I don't want 138 00:13:52,206 --> 00:13:55,626 the word deception to have a bad flavor, is inculcated into us in childhood 139 00:14:04,635 --> 00:14:07,889 in every culture in the world. 140 00:14:08,014 --> 00:14:10,641 And it leaves a permanent mark on us. 141 00:14:10,767 --> 00:14:17,774 The mark being that we come to believe that these three things are real. 142 00:14:19,734 --> 00:14:24,447 Having accomplished the job of creating a social discipline 143 00:14:24,572 --> 00:14:27,825 and of getting human beings to step the right paces 144 00:14:27,950 --> 00:14:31,579 to dance, as it were, to the tune played by the piper. 145 00:14:34,082 --> 00:14:37,376 Having done that, they are burned into us, and so 146 00:14:37,502 --> 00:14:41,089 we come to feel that we really are separate things. 147 00:14:45,343 --> 00:14:49,055 That we are agents and sources of action, that we are actually responsible for what we do, that 148 00:14:49,180 --> 00:14:52,975 there is that ego thing inside us which is the initiator, the doer, the will behind all action. 149 00:14:57,563 --> 00:15:01,442 And so we also come to believe in these various rewards and punishments, whether it be the Christian system of heaven and hell, or whether it 150 00:15:01,567 --> 00:15:05,571 be the Hindu-Buddhist system of transmigration or reincarnation, living life after life after life, inheriting in each following life the karma 151 00:15:16,582 --> 00:15:20,044 or destiny which we prepared for ourselves in the preceding one. 152 00:15:20,169 --> 00:15:22,880 And this is very convenient because then there 153 00:15:23,005 --> 00:15:25,800 is no, as it were, way of escaping the police. 154 00:15:25,925 --> 00:15:28,886 There are celestial police as well as terrestrial 155 00:15:29,011 --> 00:15:31,556 police, and by this we are kept in order. 156 00:15:31,681 --> 00:15:35,143 But you see, this stratagem of these social deceptions 157 00:15:35,268 --> 00:15:38,646 is really like a raft that we use to cross a river. 158 00:15:44,318 --> 00:15:46,195 When we have 159 00:15:46,320 --> 00:15:49,782 in young people inculcated the order. 160 00:15:49,907 --> 00:15:53,369 To go on being taken in by these deceptions is like picking up the raft when you've 161 00:15:53,494 --> 00:15:56,873 crossed to the opposite bank and carrying it with you, and it becomes a burden. 162 00:16:01,711 --> 00:16:04,922 And so what Zen is, basically, is a way of freeing human beings from those 163 00:16:05,047 --> 00:16:08,718 deceptions, returning them to the vision of the world in its complete relativity. 164 00:16:16,517 --> 00:16:20,146 Now, the training which one goes through with a Zen teacher, 165 00:16:20,271 --> 00:16:23,482 shall we say, lifts these deceptions off one's mind. 166 00:16:28,821 --> 00:16:34,744 Now, you might say, I can understand intellectually. 167 00:16:34,869 --> 00:16:38,164 I can understand the idea that I only seem to be an agent, a source of action, and 168 00:16:38,289 --> 00:16:41,876 that things only seem to be separate from each other but are actually interconnected. 169 00:16:47,590 --> 00:16:53,721 But does this make me feel any different inside? 170 00:16:53,846 --> 00:16:57,934 And you might say, well, no, I don't think it really does. 171 00:16:58,059 --> 00:17:03,481 To understand it fully, I would like to change the way I feel. 172 00:17:03,606 --> 00:17:10,446 But here comes the crucial point in the understanding of Zen. 173 00:17:10,571 --> 00:17:13,616 On the one hand, if you set out to change the 174 00:17:13,741 --> 00:17:16,994 way you feel, that might be called a discipline. 175 00:17:17,119 --> 00:17:20,456 On the other hand, if you decide simply to accept the way you feel and not try 176 00:17:20,581 --> 00:17:24,126 to change your inner feelings at all, that might be called letting things alone. 177 00:17:27,421 --> 00:17:28,965 But here's the point. 178 00:17:29,090 --> 00:17:32,635 If you have understood clearly that you as a separate will or a separate ego are a fiction, 179 00:17:32,760 --> 00:17:36,597 then on the one hand, you can't change it, and on the other hand, you can't do nothing about it. 180 00:17:44,480 --> 00:17:47,858 Because there is no agent, no separate doer, either 181 00:17:47,984 --> 00:17:51,487 to do something about it or to do nothing about it. 182 00:17:53,447 --> 00:17:59,245 And so, this situation seems, as it were, paralyzing. 183 00:17:59,370 --> 00:18:04,125 If you can't do, and if you can't don't, what's going to happen? 184 00:18:04,250 --> 00:18:07,461 But the point of this is that that paralysis is a 185 00:18:07,586 --> 00:18:11,215 realization of the unreality of the individual agent. 186 00:18:13,968 --> 00:18:15,803 So what happens? 187 00:18:16,929 --> 00:18:23,769 From this point, one ceases to take oneself seriously. 188 00:18:24,937 --> 00:18:28,232 Now, of course, there is always a danger in not taking the 189 00:18:28,357 --> 00:18:31,944 things seriously which society says we should take seriously. 190 00:18:35,531 --> 00:18:38,909 There's the case of, you know, the raw youth, the sort of 191 00:18:39,035 --> 00:18:42,538 juvenile delinquent type who's in revolt against society. 192 00:18:43,706 --> 00:18:50,713 And would use the experiences and ideas of Buddhism to justify that revolution. 193 00:18:52,631 --> 00:18:56,093 And that is why the practice in Asia is to reveal this 194 00:18:56,218 --> 00:18:59,638 point of view only to those who are socially mature. 195 00:19:06,812 --> 00:19:10,316 And so the discipline of the Zen school is a safeguard for the dangerous 196 00:19:10,441 --> 00:19:13,819 understanding or the dangerous insight which is there being hatched. 197 00:19:18,407 --> 00:19:22,244 And so all those rigorous tests which I explained, the rigorous regimen of life, these, as it were, 198 00:19:22,370 --> 00:19:26,415 do not directly produce the understanding, but they are, as it were, the guarded stockade around it. 199 00:19:33,047 --> 00:19:37,009 For Zen, you see, is fundamentally an insight. 200 00:19:37,134 --> 00:19:40,471 The recognition, in other words, of the deception, the as-if-ness of these 201 00:19:40,596 --> 00:19:44,141 fundamental assumptions about the world which are necessary to social life. 202 00:19:50,940 --> 00:19:54,318 But then, when you don't take them seriously anymore, when you 203 00:19:54,443 --> 00:19:57,947 don't take your own separate existence seriously anymore, then 204 00:19:59,365 --> 00:20:02,701 you have, as it were, been inwardly relieved of the burden 205 00:20:02,827 --> 00:20:06,372 of this feeling of responsibility which society inculcates. 206 00:20:09,708 --> 00:20:13,421 And so you might say that the object of Zen is not to obliterate the order of society or to get 207 00:20:13,546 --> 00:20:17,258 rid of its conventions, but to take them lightly, to treat the conventional unconventionally. 208 00:20:30,229 --> 00:20:33,649 And this is reflected in the art of Zen, as where you see this 209 00:20:33,774 --> 00:20:37,236 Zen monk, the Chinese Hanshan, treated like a kind of clown. 210 00:20:44,243 --> 00:20:47,455 Or, again, in such a painting as this, which shows the 211 00:20:47,580 --> 00:20:51,250 great master Hakuin, a Japanese master of the 17th century. 212 00:21:00,217 --> 00:21:05,973 This was painted by one of his students, and Hakuin himself wrote a poem above it. 213 00:21:06,098 --> 00:21:08,809 And here is the man, you see, who doesn't take himself seriously. 214 00:21:08,934 --> 00:21:12,605 It says, In the assembly of one thousand Buddhas, 215 00:21:12,730 --> 00:21:16,150 the one disliked by one thousand Buddhas. 216 00:21:16,275 --> 00:21:19,945 In the company of a multitude of demonic spirits, 217 00:21:20,070 --> 00:21:23,282 the one hated by all the demonic spirits. 218 00:21:24,492 --> 00:21:28,746 Such an ugly, shabby, dim-sighted, bald-headed one that he is. 219 00:21:28,871 --> 00:21:33,626 As he is portrayed here, his ugliness is all the more aggravated indeed. 220 00:21:33,751 --> 00:21:37,171 Or again, art treated artlessly in this vase of 221 00:21:37,296 --> 00:21:40,758 flowers by the modern Chinese painter Bai Shi. 222 00:21:46,055 --> 00:21:51,393 A great master of the craft of painting, but here painting 223 00:21:51,519 --> 00:21:57,691 almost as naively as a child, for this is artless art. 224 00:21:59,610 --> 00:22:06,075 Or again, the sacred treated in a secular way, as in this painting of 225 00:22:06,200 --> 00:22:09,495 by Sengai, another 17th century Japanese master, of the three sages, 226 00:22:09,620 --> 00:22:13,207 Buddha in the center, Lao Tzu to the left, and Confucius to the right. 227 00:22:17,336 --> 00:22:20,923 You see, they're treated in this slightly humorous 228 00:22:21,048 --> 00:22:24,343 vein that doesn't take them quite seriously. 229 00:22:26,554 --> 00:22:33,561 Now, in order to understand the real 230 00:22:35,563 --> 00:22:41,026 element of discipline in Buddhism. 231 00:22:41,151 --> 00:22:44,655 Western students often get fazed or muddled by a kind of what I would call mysterious East 232 00:22:44,780 --> 00:22:48,659 department, a projection of too much excellence on something foreign that is not familiar to us. 233 00:23:03,007 --> 00:23:06,969 And this occurs particularly among people who think of Buddhist practices as producing all kinds of fantastically miraculous and psychic 234 00:23:07,094 --> 00:23:11,015 powers, and who think that if they go to Japan to study Zen, they're going to come back converted from human beings into supermen. 235 00:23:28,073 --> 00:23:31,118 In popular superstition in Asia itself. 236 00:23:31,243 --> 00:23:34,371 Buddhism is sometimes regarded in this way. 237 00:23:34,496 --> 00:23:39,001 But really, it's a very natural thing, and we shouldn't be taken in by that. 238 00:23:39,126 --> 00:23:44,089 And when we see works of art such as this, we sometimes have difficulty in judging. 239 00:23:44,214 --> 00:23:48,093 What kind of excellence is in them, what difference there is between formal art on the one hand and 240 00:23:48,218 --> 00:23:52,181 Zen art on the other, because we are so un-with these productions, we belong to a foreign culture. 241 00:23:57,436 --> 00:24:01,774 Now let's take an example of a certain piece of calligraphy. 242 00:24:01,899 --> 00:24:05,277 I'm showing you now an informal piece of Zen 243 00:24:05,402 --> 00:24:08,864 calligraphy by a very great Chinese master. 244 00:24:08,989 --> 00:24:12,743 We, of course, can't read it, 245 00:24:12,868 --> 00:24:16,330 It doesn't mean anything to us, and therefore it seems to be nothing more 246 00:24:16,455 --> 00:24:19,833 than just lines on paper, rather interestingly and dynamically drawn. 247 00:24:24,296 --> 00:24:28,217 But now this might be compared with another piece of calligraphy. 248 00:24:28,342 --> 00:24:29,301 Which I'm showing you here. 249 00:24:29,426 --> 00:24:32,763 This, like the one done by the Chinese master, is also written by 250 00:24:32,888 --> 00:24:36,392 someone to whom the written forms have been familiar all his life. 251 00:24:38,185 --> 00:24:41,730 He's practiced them again and again and again, and he's written 252 00:24:41,855 --> 00:24:45,192 them in the same kind of cursive, running, informal style. 253 00:24:46,819 --> 00:24:49,571 But you see, here it is. 254 00:24:50,739 --> 00:24:54,660 The moon and the water, written in English with the brush. 255 00:24:54,785 --> 00:24:58,122 With the same amount of fundamental practice involved, informing the 256 00:24:58,247 --> 00:25:01,792 letters that anybody goes through in China or Japan to learn to write. 257 00:25:11,009 --> 00:25:17,975 But the style is the same informality showing the dynamics of the brush. 258 00:25:31,572 --> 00:25:35,451 So you see, a great part of the discipline of Zen is simply the discipline of Far Eastern culture, whether it be the way of life, such as 259 00:25:35,576 --> 00:25:39,580 the moral and ritual principles of Confucianism, whether it be the art of painting, or of writing, or of gardening, or whatever it may be. 260 00:25:56,096 --> 00:26:00,851 Zen is something that exists in relation to 261 00:26:00,976 --> 00:26:07,900 and is manifested through the ordinary cultural disciplines of the Far East. 262 00:26:08,025 --> 00:26:14,573 But in itself, what Zen is, is something quite different from these disciplines. 263 00:26:14,698 --> 00:26:18,202 You see, every discipline that we undergo envisages 264 00:26:18,327 --> 00:26:21,705 success in achieving certain skills, and success 265 00:26:26,585 --> 00:26:29,922 is something that we must always think about in relation 266 00:26:30,047 --> 00:26:34,426 to the individual considered as a separate agent or will. 267 00:26:34,551 --> 00:26:38,555 Do I succeed or do I not succeed? 268 00:26:38,680 --> 00:26:41,725 Zen, however, you see, is the essential 269 00:26:41,850 --> 00:26:45,646 insight that this individual will is a fiction. 270 00:26:47,147 --> 00:26:50,567 It isn't a question of fatalism either, because fatalism is the 271 00:26:50,692 --> 00:26:54,154 idea that the individual will is the puppet of circumstances. 272 00:26:57,574 --> 00:27:00,828 The insight of Zen is that there is no individual will, 273 00:27:00,953 --> 00:27:04,581 and therefore Zen is fundamentally not a matter of success. 274 00:27:06,875 --> 00:27:09,962 It's outside the range of failure and success, and 275 00:27:10,087 --> 00:27:13,882 therefore outside the range of discipline or no discipline. 276 00:27:16,468 --> 00:27:19,847 You know, one of the best books about Zen that's been written is called 277 00:27:19,972 --> 00:27:23,475 Zen in the Art of Archery by a German professor, and it describes there 278 00:27:26,478 --> 00:27:29,273 a man who was so proficient in archery through the 279 00:27:29,398 --> 00:27:32,609 study of Zen that he could hit the bullseye in the dark. 280 00:27:32,734 --> 00:27:36,071 But a friend of mine, the composer John Cage, was recently traveling in Japan, 281 00:27:36,196 --> 00:27:39,741 and a Japanese said to him, you know, something needs to be added to that book. 282 00:27:42,953 --> 00:27:46,456 We have a very, very highly regarded Zen archery master in Japan 283 00:27:46,582 --> 00:27:49,960 today, and he can't even hit the bullseye in broad daylight. 283 00:27:50,305 --> 00:28:50,479 Support us and become VIP member to remove all ads from www.OpenSubtitles.org