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The Philosophies Of Asia
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CONTENTS
The Relevance of Oriental Philosophy
The Mythology of Hinduism
Eco-Zen
Swallowing a BaU of Hot Iron
Intellectual Yoga
Introduction to Buddhism
The Taoist Way of Karma
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SAMPLE CONTENT
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE TAOIST WAY OF KARMA
The philosophy of the Tao is one of the two great principle components of Chinese thought. There are, of course, quite a number of forms of Chinese philosophy, but there are two great currents that have thoroughly molded the culture of China-Taoism and Confucianismand they play a curious game with each other. Let me start by saying something about Confucianism originating with K'ung Fu-tzu or Confucius, who lived a little after 630 B.c. He is often supposed to have been a contemporary of Lao-tzu, who is the supposed founder of the Taoist way. It seems more likely, however, that Laotzu lived later than 400 B.c., according to most modern scholars.
Confucianism is not a religion, it is a social ritual and a way of ordering society-so much so that the first great Catholic missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, who was a Jesuit, found it perfectly consistent with his Catholicism to participate in Confucian rituals. He saw them as something of a kind of national character, as one might pay respect to the flag or something like that in our own times. He found that Confucianism involved no conflict with Catholicism and no commitment to any belief or dogma that would be at variance with the Catholic faith. So, Confucianism is an order of society and involves ideas of human relations, including the government and the family. This order is based on the principle of what is called in Chinese ren, which is an extraordinarily interesting word. The word ren is often translated as "benevolence," but that is not a good translation at all. This word means "human-heartedness" (that's the nearest we can get to it in English), and it was regarded by Confucius as the highest of all virtues, but one that he always refused to define. It is above righteousness, justice, propriety, and other great Confucian virtues, and it involves the principle that human nature is a fundamentally good arrangement, including not only our virtuous side but also our passionate side-our appetites and our waywardness. The Hebrews have a term that they call the yetzer ha-ra, which means "the wayward inclination," or what I like to call the element of irreducible rascality that God put into all human beings because it was a good thing. It was good for humans to have these two elements in them. So, a truly human-hearted person is a gentleman with a slight touch of rascality, just as one has to have salt in a stew.
Confucius said the goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue, meaning that to try to be wholly righteous is to go beyond humanity and to be something that isn't human. So, this gives the Confucian approach to life, justice, and all those sorts of things a kind of queer humor, a sort of "boys will be boys" attitude,,which is nevertheless a very mature way of handling human problems.
It was, of course, for this reason that the Japanese Buddhist priests (especially Zen priests) who visited China to study Buddhism introduced Confucianism into Japan. Despite certain limitations that Confucianism has-and it always needs the Taoist philosophy as a counterbalance-it has been one of the most successful philosophies in all history for regulation of governmental and family relationships. Confucianism prescribes all kinds of formal relationships-linguistic, ceremonial, musical, in etiquette, and in all the spheres of moralsand for this reason has always been twitted by the Taoists for being unnatural. But you need these two components, and they play against each other beautifully in Chinese society.
Roughly speaking, the Confucian way of life is for people involved in the world. The Taoist way of life is for people who get disentangled. Now, as we know in our own modern times, there are various ways of getting disentangled from the regular lifestyle of the United States. If you want to go through the regular lifestyle of the United States, you go to high school and college, and then you go into a profession or a business. You own a standard house, raise a family, have a car or two, and do all that jazz. But a lot of people don't want to live that way, and there are lots of other ways of living besides that. So, you could say that those of us who go along with the pattern correspond to the Confucians. Those who are bohemians, bums, beatniks, or whatever, and don't correspond with the pattern, are more like the Taoists. Actually, in Chinese history, Taoism is a way of life for older people. Lao-tzu, the name given to the founder of Taoism, means "the old boy," and the legend is that when he was born he already had a white beard.
So, it is sort of like this: When you have contributed to society, contributed children and brought them up, and have assumed a certain role in social life, you then say, "Now it's time for me to find out what it's all about. Who am I ultimately, behind my outward personality? What is the secret source of things?" The later half of life is the preeminently excellent time to find this out. It is something to do when you have finished with the family business. I am not saying that is a sort of unavoidable strict rule. Of course, one can study the Tao when very young, because it contains all kinds of secrets as to the performance of every kind of art, craft, business, or any occupation whatsoever. In China, in a way, it plays the role of a kind of safety valve for the more restrictive way of life that Confucianism prescribes. There is a sort of type in China who is known as "the Old Robe." He is a sort of intellectual bum, often found among scholars, who is admired very much and is a type of character that had an enormous influence on the development of the ideals of Zen Buddhist life. He is one who goes with nature rather than against nature.
First of all, I am going to address ideas that come strictly out of Lao-tzu's book, the Tao Te Ching. Of course, the basis of the whole philosophy is the conception of Tao. This word has many meanings, and the book of Lao-tzu starts out by saying that the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. You cannot give all the meanings, because the word tao means both "the way or course of nature or of everything" and "to speak." So, the actual opening phrase of the book, following this word tao, is a character that means "can be," or "can," or something like "able." So, according to its second meaning it is "the way that can be spoken, described, or uttered." But it also means the way that can be "wayed," although you would have to invent that word. The way that can be traveled, perhaps, is not the eternal way. In other words, there is no way of following the Tao; there is no recipe for it. I cannot give you any do-it-yourself instructions as to how it is done. It is like when Louis Armstrong was asked, "What is jazz?" He said, "If you have to ask, you don't know." Now that's awkward, isn't it? But we can gather what it is by absorbing certain atmospheres and attitudes connected with those who follow it. We can also gather what it is from the art, poetry, expressions, anecdotes, and stories that illustrate the philosophy of the way.
So, this word then, tao, the "way or the course of things," is not, as some Christian missionaries translated it, the Logos, taking as their point of departure the opening passage of Saint john's Gospel, "In the beginning was the word." If you look this up in a Chinese translation of the Bible, it usually says, "In the beginning was the Tao. And the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by it and without it was not anything made that was made." So, they have substituted "Tao," and that would have a very funny effect on a Chinese philosopher, because the idea of things being made by the Tao is absurd. The Tao is not a manufacturer, and it is not a governor. It does not rule, as it were, in the position of a king. Although the book Tao Te Ching is written for many purposes, one of its important purposes is as a manual of guidance for a ruler. What it tells him is, essentially, "Rule by not ruling. Don't lord it over the people." And so, Lao-tzu says, "The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them, and when good things are accomplished, it lays no claim to them." In other words, the Tao doesn't stand up and say, "I have made all of you. I have filled this earth with its beauty and glory. Fall down before me and worship." The Tao, having done everything, always escapes and is not around to receive any thanks or acknowledgment, because it loves obscurity. As Lao-tzu said, "The Tao is like water. It always seeks the lowest level, which human beings abhor." So, it is a very mysterious idea.
Tao, then, is not really equivalent with any Western or Hindu idea of God, because God is always associated with being the Lord. Even in India, the Brahman is often called the Supreme Lord, although that is a term more strictly applicable to Ishvara, the manifestation of Brahman in the form of a personal God. But the Lord Krishna's song is the Bbagavad Gita, the "Song of the Lord," and there is always the idea of the king and the ruler attached. This is not so in the Chinese Tao philosophy. The Tao is not something different from nature, ourselves, and our surrounding trees, waters, and air. The Tao is the way all that behaves. So, the basic Chinese idea of the universe is really that it is an organism. As we shall see when we get on to the Cbuang-tzu (which was written by Chuang-tzu), who is the sort of elaborator of Lao-tzu, he sees everything operating together so that you cannot find the controlling center anywhere, because there isn't any. The world is a system of interrelated components, none of which can survive without the other, just as in the case of bees and flowers. You will never find bees in a place where there are not flowers, and you will never find flowers in a place where there are not bees or other insects that do the equivalent job. What that tells us, secretly, is that although bees and flowers look different from each other, they are inseparable. To use a very important Taoist expression, they arise mutually. "To be" and "not to be" mutually arise. This character is based on the picture of a plant, something that grows out of the ground. So, you could say, positive and negative, to be and not to be, yes and no, and light and dark arise mutually and come into being. There is no cause and effect; that is not the relationship at all. It is like the egg and the hen. The bees and the flowers coexist in the same way as high and low, back and front, long and short, loud and soft-all those experiences are experienceable only in terms of their polar opposite.
The Chinese idea of nature is that all the various species arise mutually because they interdepend, and this total system of interdependence is the Tao. It involves certain other things that go along with Tao, but this Mutual arising is the key idea to the whole thing. If you want to understand Chinese and Oriental thought in general, it is the most important thing to grasp, because we think so much in terms of cause and effect. We think of the universe today in Aristotelian and Newtonian ways. According to that philosophy the world is separated. It is like a huge amalgamation of billiard balls, and they don't move until struck by another or by a cue. So, everything is going tock, tock, tock, all over the place; one thing starts off another in a mechanical way. Of course, from the standpoint of twentieth-century science, we know perfectly well now that this is not the way it works. We know enough about relationships to see that the mechanical model that Newton devised was all right for certain purposes, but it breaks down now, because we understand relativity and we see how things go together in a kind of connected net, rather than in a chain of billiard balls banging each other around.
So, then, we move to a second term that is extremely important. The expression tzu-jan is the term that we translate as "nature" in Chinese, but this term expresses a whole point of view. It does not say nature, natura, which means, in a way, "a class of things." It means, literally, "self so" or "what is so of itself." It is what happens of itself, and thus, spontaneity. Early on in the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu says, "The Tao's method is to be so of itself." Now, we might translate that as 14 automatic" were it not that the word automatic has a mechanical flavor. Tzu-jan, or sbizen in Japanese, means "spontaneous": it happens as your heart beats. You don't do anything about it, don't force your heart to beat, and you don't make it beat-it does it by itself. Now, figure a world in which everything happens by itself-it doesn't have to be controlled, it is allowed. Whereas you might say the idea of God involves the control of everything going on, the idea of the Tao is of the ruler who abdicates and trusts all the people to conduct their own affairs, to let it all "happen." This doesn't mean that there is not a unified organism and that everything is in chaos. It means that the more liberty and the more love
you give, and the more you allow things in yourself and in your surroundings to take place, the more order you will have.
It is generally believed in India that when a person sets out on the way of liberation, his first problem is to become free from his past karma. The word karma literally means "action" or "doing" in Sanskrit, so that when we say something that happens to you is your karma, it is like saying in English, "it is your own doing." In popular Indian belief, karma is a sort of builtin moral law or a law of retribution, such that all the bad things and all the good things you do have consequences that you have to inherit. So long as karmic energy remains stored up, you have to work it out, and what the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action, which in Sanskrit is called nishkama karma. Nishkama means "without passion" or "without attachment," and karma means "action." So, whatever action he does, he renounces the fruits of the action, so that he acts in a way that does not generate future karma. Future karma continues you in the wheel of becoming, samsara, the "round," and keeps you being reincarnated.
Now, when you start to get out of the chain of karma, all the creditors that you have start presenting themselves for Payment. In other words, a person who begins to study yoga may feel that he will suddenly get sick or that his children will die, or that he will lose his money, or that all sorts of catastrophes will occur because the karmic debt is being cleared up. There is no hurry to be "cleared up" if you're just living along like anybody, but if you embark on the spiritual life, a certain hurry occurs. Therefore, since this is known, it is rather discouraging to start these things. The Christian way of saying the same thing is that if you plan to change your life (shall we say to turn over a new leaf?) you mustn't let the devil know, because he will oppose you with all his might if he suddenly discovers that you're going to escape from his power. So, for example, if you have a bad habit, such as drinking too much, and you make a New Year's resolution that during this coming year you will stop drinking, that is a very dangerous thing to do. The devil will immediately know about it, and he will confront you with the prospect of 365 drinkless days. That will be awful, just overwhelming, and you won't be able to make much more than three days on the wagon. So, in that case, you compromise with the devil and say, "Just today I'm not going to drink, you see, but tomorrow maybe we'll go back." Then, when tomorrow comes, you say, "Oh, just another day, let's try, that's all." And the next day, you say, "Oh, one more day won't make much difference." So, you only do it for the moment, and you don't let the devil know that you have a secret intention of going on day after day after day after day. Of course, there's something still better than that, and that is not to let the devil know anything. That means, of course, not to let yourself know. One of the many meanings of that saying "Let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth" is just this. That is why, in Zen discipline, a great deal of it centers around acting without premeditation. As those of you know who read Eugen Herrigel's book Zen in the Art of Archery, it was necessary to release the bowstring without first saying "Now." There's a wonderful story you may have also read by a German writer, Van Kleist, about a boxing match with a bear. The man can never defeat this bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance and is ready to deal with any situation. The only way to get through to the bear would be to hit the bear without having first intended to do so. That would catch him. So, this is one of the great problems in the spiritual life, or whatever you want to call it: to be able to have intention and to act simultaneously- this means you escape karma and the devil.
So, you might say that the Taoist is exemplary in this respect: that this is getting free from karma without making any previous announcement. Supposing we have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars. You can go to the back end and unload them one by one and shunt them into the siding, but the simplest of all ways is to uncouple between the engine and the first car, and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once. It is in that sort of way that the Taoist gets rid of karma without challenging it, and so it has the reputation ofbeing the easy way. There are all kinds of yogas and ways for people who want to be difficult. One of the great gambits of a man like Gurdjieff was to make it all seem as difficult as possible, because that challenged the vanity of his students.
If some teacher or some guru says, "Really, this isn't difficult at all-it's perfectly easy," some people will say, "Oh, he's not really the real thing. We want something tough and difficult." When we see somebody who starts out by giving you a discipline that's very weird and rigid, people think, "Now there is the thing. That man means business." So they flatter themselves by thinking that by going to such a guy they are serious students,
whereas the other people are only dabblers, and so on. All right, if you have to do it that way, that's the way you have to do it. But the Taoist is the kind of person who shows you the shortcut, and shows you how to do it by intelligence rather than effort, because that's what it is. Taoism is, in that sense, what everybody is looking for, the easy way in, the shortcut, using cleverness instead of muscle.
So, the question naturally arises, "Isn't it cheating?" When, in any game, somebody really starts using his intelligence, he will very likely be accused of cheating; and to draw the line between skill and cheating is a very difficult thing to do. The inferior intelligence will always accuse a superior intelligence of cheating; that is its way of saving face. "You beat me by means that weren't fair. We were originally having a contest to find out who had the strongest muscles. And you know we were pushing against it like this, and this would prove who had the strongest muscles. But then you introduced some gimmick into it, some judo trick or something like that, and you're not playing fair." So, in the whole domain of ways of liberation, there are routes for the stupid people and routes for the intelligent people, and the latter are faster. This was perfectly clearly explained by Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Zen in China, in his Platform Sutra, where he said, "The difference between the gradual school and the sudden school is that although they both arrive at the same point, the gradual is for slow-witted people and the sudden is for fast-witred people." In other words, can you find a way that sees into your own nature-that sees into the Tao immediately.
Earlier, I pointed out to you the immediate way, the way through now. When you know that this moment is the Tao, and this moment is considered by itself without past and without future-eternal, neither coming into being nor going out of being-there is nirvana. And there is a whole Chinese philosophy of time based on this. It has not, to my knowledge, been very much discussed by Taoist writers; it's been more discussed by Buddhist writers. But it's all based on the same thing. Zenji Dogen, the great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen Buddhist, studied in China and wrote a book called Sbobogenzo. A rosbi recently said to me in Japan, "That's a terrible book, because it tells you everything. It gives the whole secret away." But in the course of this book, he says, "There is no such thing as a progression in time. The spring does not become the summer. There is first spring, and then there is summer." So, in the same way, "you" now do not become "you" later.
In T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, he says that the person who is settled down on the train to read the newspaper is not the same person who stepped onto the train from the platform. Therefore, you who sit here are not the same people who came in at the door: these states are separate, each in its own place. There was the "coming in at the door person," but there is actually only the "here-and-now sitting person." The person sitting here and now is not the person who will die, because we are all a constant flux. The continuity of the person from past through present to future is as illusory in its own way as the upward movement of the red lines on a revolving barber pole. You know it goes round and round, and the whole thing seems to be going up or going down, whichever the case may be, but actually nothing is going up or down. When you throw a pebble into the pond and you make concentric rings of waves, there is an illusion that the water is flowing outward, but no water is flowing outward at all. The water is only going up and down. What appears to move outward is the wave, not the water. So this kind of philosophical argument says that our seeming to go along in a course of time does not really happen.
The Buddhists say that suffering exists, but no one who suffers. Deeds exist, but no doers are found. A path there is, but no one follows it. And nirvana is, but no one attains it. In this way, they look upon the continuity of life as the same sort of illusion that is produced when you take a cigarette and whirl it in the dark and create the illusion of the circle, whereas there is only the one point of fire. The argument, then, is that so long as you are in the present there aren't any problems. The problems exist only when you allow presents to amalgamate. There is a way of putting this in Chinese that is rather interesting. They have a very interesting sign-it's pronounced nin (nen in Japanese). The top part of the character means "now" and the bottom part means "the mind heart," the shin. And so, this is, as it were, an instant of thought. In Chinese they use this character as the equivalent for the Sanskrit word inana. Then, if you double this character and put it twice or three times, nin, nin, nin-it means "thought after thought after thought." The Zen master joshu was once asked, "What is the mind of the child?" He said, "A ball in a mountain stream." He was asked, "What do you mean by a ball in a mountain stream?" Joshua said, "Thought after thought after thought with no block." He was using, of course, the mind of the child as the innocent mind, the mind of a person who is enlightened. One thought follows
another without hesitation. The thought arises; it does not wait to arise. When you clap your hands, the sound issues without hesitation. When you strike flint, the spark comes out; it does not wait to come out. That means that there's no block.
So, "thought, thought, thought"-nin, nin, nin describes what we call in our world the stream of consciousness. Blocking consists in letting the stream become connected, or chained together in such a way that when the present thought arises, it seems to be dragging its past, or resisting its future by saying, "I don't want to go." When the connection, or the dragging of these thoughts, stops, you have broken the chain of karma. If you think of this in comparison with certain problems in music it is very interesting, because when we listen to music, we hear melody only because we remember the sequence. We hear the intervals between the tones, but more than that, we remember the tones that led up to the one we are now hearing. We are trained musically to anticipate certain consequences, and to the extent that we get the consequences, we anticipate it, we feel that we understand the music. But to the extent that the composer does not adhere to the rules-and gives us unexpected consequences-we feel that we don't understand the music. If he gives us harmonic relationships that we are trained not to accept, or expect, we say, "Well this man is just writing garbage." Of course, it becomes apparent that the perception of music and the ability to hear melody will depend upon a relationship between past, present, and future sounds. You might Say, "Well, you're talking about a way of living that would be equivalent to listening to music with a tonedeaf mind so that you would eliminate the melody and have only noise. In your Taoist way of life, you would eliminate all meaning and have only senseless present Moments." Up to a point that is true; that is, in a way, what Buddhists also mean by seeing things in their suchness.
What is so bad about dying, for example? It's really no problem. When you die, you just drop dead, and that's all there is to it. But what makes it a problem is that you are dragging a past. And all those things you have done, all those achievements you've made and all these relationships and people that you've accumulated as your friends have to go. It isn't here now. A few friends might be around you, but all the past that identifies you as who you are (which is simply memory) has to go, and we feel just terrible about that. If we didn't, if we were just dying and that's all, death would not be a problem. Likewise, the chores of everyday life become intolerable when everything-all the past and futureties together and you feel it dragging at you every way. Supposing you wake up in the morning and it's a lovely morning. Let's take today, right here and now-here we are in this paradise of a place and some of us have to go to work on Monday. Is that a problem? For many people it is because it spoils the taste of what is going on now. When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we have to jump that day, immediately we feel sad, bored, and bothered. Whereas, actually, we're just lying in bed.
So, the Taoist trick is simply, "Live now and there will be no problems." That is the meaning of the Zen saying, "When you are hungry, eat. When you are tired, sleep. When you walk, walk. When you sit, sit." Rinzai, the great Tung dynasty master, said, "In the practice of Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Sleep when you're tired, move your bowels, eat when you're hungry-that's all. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand." The meaning of the wonderful Zen saying "Every day is a good day" is that they come one after another, and yet there is only this one. You don't link them. This, as I intimated just a moment ago, seems to be an atomization of life. Things just do what they do. The flower goes puff, and people go this way and that way, and so on, and that is what is happening. It has no meaning, no destination, no value. It is just like that. When you see that, you see it's a great relief. That is all it is. Then, when you are firmly established in suchness, and it is just this moment, you can begin again to play with the connections, only you have seen through them. Now they don't haunt you, because you know that there isn't any continuous you running on from moment to moment who originated sometime in the past and will die sometime in the future. All that has disappeared. So, you can have enormous fun anticipating the future, remembering the past, and playing all kinds of continuities. This is the meaning of that famous Zen saying about mountains: "To the naive man, mountains are mountains, waters are waters. To the intermediate student, mountains are no longer mountains, waters are no longer waters." In other words, they have dissolved into the point instant, the tsbana. "But for the fully perfected student, mountains are again mountains and waters are again waters."
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by Alan Watts
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CONTENTS
The Relevance of Oriental Philosophy
The Mythology of Hinduism
Eco-Zen
Swallowing a BaU of Hot Iron
Intellectual Yoga
Introduction to Buddhism
The Taoist Way of Karma
_______________________________
SAMPLE CONTENT
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE TAOIST WAY OF KARMA
The philosophy of the Tao is one of the two great principle components of Chinese thought. There are, of course, quite a number of forms of Chinese philosophy, but there are two great currents that have thoroughly molded the culture of China-Taoism and Confucianismand they play a curious game with each other. Let me start by saying something about Confucianism originating with K'ung Fu-tzu or Confucius, who lived a little after 630 B.c. He is often supposed to have been a contemporary of Lao-tzu, who is the supposed founder of the Taoist way. It seems more likely, however, that Laotzu lived later than 400 B.c., according to most modern scholars.
Confucianism is not a religion, it is a social ritual and a way of ordering society-so much so that the first great Catholic missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, who was a Jesuit, found it perfectly consistent with his Catholicism to participate in Confucian rituals. He saw them as something of a kind of national character, as one might pay respect to the flag or something like that in our own times. He found that Confucianism involved no conflict with Catholicism and no commitment to any belief or dogma that would be at variance with the Catholic faith. So, Confucianism is an order of society and involves ideas of human relations, including the government and the family. This order is based on the principle of what is called in Chinese ren, which is an extraordinarily interesting word. The word ren is often translated as "benevolence," but that is not a good translation at all. This word means "human-heartedness" (that's the nearest we can get to it in English), and it was regarded by Confucius as the highest of all virtues, but one that he always refused to define. It is above righteousness, justice, propriety, and other great Confucian virtues, and it involves the principle that human nature is a fundamentally good arrangement, including not only our virtuous side but also our passionate side-our appetites and our waywardness. The Hebrews have a term that they call the yetzer ha-ra, which means "the wayward inclination," or what I like to call the element of irreducible rascality that God put into all human beings because it was a good thing. It was good for humans to have these two elements in them. So, a truly human-hearted person is a gentleman with a slight touch of rascality, just as one has to have salt in a stew.
Confucius said the goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue, meaning that to try to be wholly righteous is to go beyond humanity and to be something that isn't human. So, this gives the Confucian approach to life, justice, and all those sorts of things a kind of queer humor, a sort of "boys will be boys" attitude,,which is nevertheless a very mature way of handling human problems.
It was, of course, for this reason that the Japanese Buddhist priests (especially Zen priests) who visited China to study Buddhism introduced Confucianism into Japan. Despite certain limitations that Confucianism has-and it always needs the Taoist philosophy as a counterbalance-it has been one of the most successful philosophies in all history for regulation of governmental and family relationships. Confucianism prescribes all kinds of formal relationships-linguistic, ceremonial, musical, in etiquette, and in all the spheres of moralsand for this reason has always been twitted by the Taoists for being unnatural. But you need these two components, and they play against each other beautifully in Chinese society.
Roughly speaking, the Confucian way of life is for people involved in the world. The Taoist way of life is for people who get disentangled. Now, as we know in our own modern times, there are various ways of getting disentangled from the regular lifestyle of the United States. If you want to go through the regular lifestyle of the United States, you go to high school and college, and then you go into a profession or a business. You own a standard house, raise a family, have a car or two, and do all that jazz. But a lot of people don't want to live that way, and there are lots of other ways of living besides that. So, you could say that those of us who go along with the pattern correspond to the Confucians. Those who are bohemians, bums, beatniks, or whatever, and don't correspond with the pattern, are more like the Taoists. Actually, in Chinese history, Taoism is a way of life for older people. Lao-tzu, the name given to the founder of Taoism, means "the old boy," and the legend is that when he was born he already had a white beard.
So, it is sort of like this: When you have contributed to society, contributed children and brought them up, and have assumed a certain role in social life, you then say, "Now it's time for me to find out what it's all about. Who am I ultimately, behind my outward personality? What is the secret source of things?" The later half of life is the preeminently excellent time to find this out. It is something to do when you have finished with the family business. I am not saying that is a sort of unavoidable strict rule. Of course, one can study the Tao when very young, because it contains all kinds of secrets as to the performance of every kind of art, craft, business, or any occupation whatsoever. In China, in a way, it plays the role of a kind of safety valve for the more restrictive way of life that Confucianism prescribes. There is a sort of type in China who is known as "the Old Robe." He is a sort of intellectual bum, often found among scholars, who is admired very much and is a type of character that had an enormous influence on the development of the ideals of Zen Buddhist life. He is one who goes with nature rather than against nature.
First of all, I am going to address ideas that come strictly out of Lao-tzu's book, the Tao Te Ching. Of course, the basis of the whole philosophy is the conception of Tao. This word has many meanings, and the book of Lao-tzu starts out by saying that the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. You cannot give all the meanings, because the word tao means both "the way or course of nature or of everything" and "to speak." So, the actual opening phrase of the book, following this word tao, is a character that means "can be," or "can," or something like "able." So, according to its second meaning it is "the way that can be spoken, described, or uttered." But it also means the way that can be "wayed," although you would have to invent that word. The way that can be traveled, perhaps, is not the eternal way. In other words, there is no way of following the Tao; there is no recipe for it. I cannot give you any do-it-yourself instructions as to how it is done. It is like when Louis Armstrong was asked, "What is jazz?" He said, "If you have to ask, you don't know." Now that's awkward, isn't it? But we can gather what it is by absorbing certain atmospheres and attitudes connected with those who follow it. We can also gather what it is from the art, poetry, expressions, anecdotes, and stories that illustrate the philosophy of the way.
So, this word then, tao, the "way or the course of things," is not, as some Christian missionaries translated it, the Logos, taking as their point of departure the opening passage of Saint john's Gospel, "In the beginning was the word." If you look this up in a Chinese translation of the Bible, it usually says, "In the beginning was the Tao. And the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by it and without it was not anything made that was made." So, they have substituted "Tao," and that would have a very funny effect on a Chinese philosopher, because the idea of things being made by the Tao is absurd. The Tao is not a manufacturer, and it is not a governor. It does not rule, as it were, in the position of a king. Although the book Tao Te Ching is written for many purposes, one of its important purposes is as a manual of guidance for a ruler. What it tells him is, essentially, "Rule by not ruling. Don't lord it over the people." And so, Lao-tzu says, "The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them, and when good things are accomplished, it lays no claim to them." In other words, the Tao doesn't stand up and say, "I have made all of you. I have filled this earth with its beauty and glory. Fall down before me and worship." The Tao, having done everything, always escapes and is not around to receive any thanks or acknowledgment, because it loves obscurity. As Lao-tzu said, "The Tao is like water. It always seeks the lowest level, which human beings abhor." So, it is a very mysterious idea.
Tao, then, is not really equivalent with any Western or Hindu idea of God, because God is always associated with being the Lord. Even in India, the Brahman is often called the Supreme Lord, although that is a term more strictly applicable to Ishvara, the manifestation of Brahman in the form of a personal God. But the Lord Krishna's song is the Bbagavad Gita, the "Song of the Lord," and there is always the idea of the king and the ruler attached. This is not so in the Chinese Tao philosophy. The Tao is not something different from nature, ourselves, and our surrounding trees, waters, and air. The Tao is the way all that behaves. So, the basic Chinese idea of the universe is really that it is an organism. As we shall see when we get on to the Cbuang-tzu (which was written by Chuang-tzu), who is the sort of elaborator of Lao-tzu, he sees everything operating together so that you cannot find the controlling center anywhere, because there isn't any. The world is a system of interrelated components, none of which can survive without the other, just as in the case of bees and flowers. You will never find bees in a place where there are not flowers, and you will never find flowers in a place where there are not bees or other insects that do the equivalent job. What that tells us, secretly, is that although bees and flowers look different from each other, they are inseparable. To use a very important Taoist expression, they arise mutually. "To be" and "not to be" mutually arise. This character is based on the picture of a plant, something that grows out of the ground. So, you could say, positive and negative, to be and not to be, yes and no, and light and dark arise mutually and come into being. There is no cause and effect; that is not the relationship at all. It is like the egg and the hen. The bees and the flowers coexist in the same way as high and low, back and front, long and short, loud and soft-all those experiences are experienceable only in terms of their polar opposite.
The Chinese idea of nature is that all the various species arise mutually because they interdepend, and this total system of interdependence is the Tao. It involves certain other things that go along with Tao, but this Mutual arising is the key idea to the whole thing. If you want to understand Chinese and Oriental thought in general, it is the most important thing to grasp, because we think so much in terms of cause and effect. We think of the universe today in Aristotelian and Newtonian ways. According to that philosophy the world is separated. It is like a huge amalgamation of billiard balls, and they don't move until struck by another or by a cue. So, everything is going tock, tock, tock, all over the place; one thing starts off another in a mechanical way. Of course, from the standpoint of twentieth-century science, we know perfectly well now that this is not the way it works. We know enough about relationships to see that the mechanical model that Newton devised was all right for certain purposes, but it breaks down now, because we understand relativity and we see how things go together in a kind of connected net, rather than in a chain of billiard balls banging each other around.
So, then, we move to a second term that is extremely important. The expression tzu-jan is the term that we translate as "nature" in Chinese, but this term expresses a whole point of view. It does not say nature, natura, which means, in a way, "a class of things." It means, literally, "self so" or "what is so of itself." It is what happens of itself, and thus, spontaneity. Early on in the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu says, "The Tao's method is to be so of itself." Now, we might translate that as 14 automatic" were it not that the word automatic has a mechanical flavor. Tzu-jan, or sbizen in Japanese, means "spontaneous": it happens as your heart beats. You don't do anything about it, don't force your heart to beat, and you don't make it beat-it does it by itself. Now, figure a world in which everything happens by itself-it doesn't have to be controlled, it is allowed. Whereas you might say the idea of God involves the control of everything going on, the idea of the Tao is of the ruler who abdicates and trusts all the people to conduct their own affairs, to let it all "happen." This doesn't mean that there is not a unified organism and that everything is in chaos. It means that the more liberty and the more love
you give, and the more you allow things in yourself and in your surroundings to take place, the more order you will have.
It is generally believed in India that when a person sets out on the way of liberation, his first problem is to become free from his past karma. The word karma literally means "action" or "doing" in Sanskrit, so that when we say something that happens to you is your karma, it is like saying in English, "it is your own doing." In popular Indian belief, karma is a sort of builtin moral law or a law of retribution, such that all the bad things and all the good things you do have consequences that you have to inherit. So long as karmic energy remains stored up, you have to work it out, and what the sage endeavors to do is a kind of action, which in Sanskrit is called nishkama karma. Nishkama means "without passion" or "without attachment," and karma means "action." So, whatever action he does, he renounces the fruits of the action, so that he acts in a way that does not generate future karma. Future karma continues you in the wheel of becoming, samsara, the "round," and keeps you being reincarnated.
Now, when you start to get out of the chain of karma, all the creditors that you have start presenting themselves for Payment. In other words, a person who begins to study yoga may feel that he will suddenly get sick or that his children will die, or that he will lose his money, or that all sorts of catastrophes will occur because the karmic debt is being cleared up. There is no hurry to be "cleared up" if you're just living along like anybody, but if you embark on the spiritual life, a certain hurry occurs. Therefore, since this is known, it is rather discouraging to start these things. The Christian way of saying the same thing is that if you plan to change your life (shall we say to turn over a new leaf?) you mustn't let the devil know, because he will oppose you with all his might if he suddenly discovers that you're going to escape from his power. So, for example, if you have a bad habit, such as drinking too much, and you make a New Year's resolution that during this coming year you will stop drinking, that is a very dangerous thing to do. The devil will immediately know about it, and he will confront you with the prospect of 365 drinkless days. That will be awful, just overwhelming, and you won't be able to make much more than three days on the wagon. So, in that case, you compromise with the devil and say, "Just today I'm not going to drink, you see, but tomorrow maybe we'll go back." Then, when tomorrow comes, you say, "Oh, just another day, let's try, that's all." And the next day, you say, "Oh, one more day won't make much difference." So, you only do it for the moment, and you don't let the devil know that you have a secret intention of going on day after day after day after day. Of course, there's something still better than that, and that is not to let the devil know anything. That means, of course, not to let yourself know. One of the many meanings of that saying "Let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth" is just this. That is why, in Zen discipline, a great deal of it centers around acting without premeditation. As those of you know who read Eugen Herrigel's book Zen in the Art of Archery, it was necessary to release the bowstring without first saying "Now." There's a wonderful story you may have also read by a German writer, Van Kleist, about a boxing match with a bear. The man can never defeat this bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance and is ready to deal with any situation. The only way to get through to the bear would be to hit the bear without having first intended to do so. That would catch him. So, this is one of the great problems in the spiritual life, or whatever you want to call it: to be able to have intention and to act simultaneously- this means you escape karma and the devil.
So, you might say that the Taoist is exemplary in this respect: that this is getting free from karma without making any previous announcement. Supposing we have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars. You can go to the back end and unload them one by one and shunt them into the siding, but the simplest of all ways is to uncouple between the engine and the first car, and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once. It is in that sort of way that the Taoist gets rid of karma without challenging it, and so it has the reputation ofbeing the easy way. There are all kinds of yogas and ways for people who want to be difficult. One of the great gambits of a man like Gurdjieff was to make it all seem as difficult as possible, because that challenged the vanity of his students.
If some teacher or some guru says, "Really, this isn't difficult at all-it's perfectly easy," some people will say, "Oh, he's not really the real thing. We want something tough and difficult." When we see somebody who starts out by giving you a discipline that's very weird and rigid, people think, "Now there is the thing. That man means business." So they flatter themselves by thinking that by going to such a guy they are serious students,
whereas the other people are only dabblers, and so on. All right, if you have to do it that way, that's the way you have to do it. But the Taoist is the kind of person who shows you the shortcut, and shows you how to do it by intelligence rather than effort, because that's what it is. Taoism is, in that sense, what everybody is looking for, the easy way in, the shortcut, using cleverness instead of muscle.
So, the question naturally arises, "Isn't it cheating?" When, in any game, somebody really starts using his intelligence, he will very likely be accused of cheating; and to draw the line between skill and cheating is a very difficult thing to do. The inferior intelligence will always accuse a superior intelligence of cheating; that is its way of saving face. "You beat me by means that weren't fair. We were originally having a contest to find out who had the strongest muscles. And you know we were pushing against it like this, and this would prove who had the strongest muscles. But then you introduced some gimmick into it, some judo trick or something like that, and you're not playing fair." So, in the whole domain of ways of liberation, there are routes for the stupid people and routes for the intelligent people, and the latter are faster. This was perfectly clearly explained by Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Zen in China, in his Platform Sutra, where he said, "The difference between the gradual school and the sudden school is that although they both arrive at the same point, the gradual is for slow-witted people and the sudden is for fast-witred people." In other words, can you find a way that sees into your own nature-that sees into the Tao immediately.
Earlier, I pointed out to you the immediate way, the way through now. When you know that this moment is the Tao, and this moment is considered by itself without past and without future-eternal, neither coming into being nor going out of being-there is nirvana. And there is a whole Chinese philosophy of time based on this. It has not, to my knowledge, been very much discussed by Taoist writers; it's been more discussed by Buddhist writers. But it's all based on the same thing. Zenji Dogen, the great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen Buddhist, studied in China and wrote a book called Sbobogenzo. A rosbi recently said to me in Japan, "That's a terrible book, because it tells you everything. It gives the whole secret away." But in the course of this book, he says, "There is no such thing as a progression in time. The spring does not become the summer. There is first spring, and then there is summer." So, in the same way, "you" now do not become "you" later.
In T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, he says that the person who is settled down on the train to read the newspaper is not the same person who stepped onto the train from the platform. Therefore, you who sit here are not the same people who came in at the door: these states are separate, each in its own place. There was the "coming in at the door person," but there is actually only the "here-and-now sitting person." The person sitting here and now is not the person who will die, because we are all a constant flux. The continuity of the person from past through present to future is as illusory in its own way as the upward movement of the red lines on a revolving barber pole. You know it goes round and round, and the whole thing seems to be going up or going down, whichever the case may be, but actually nothing is going up or down. When you throw a pebble into the pond and you make concentric rings of waves, there is an illusion that the water is flowing outward, but no water is flowing outward at all. The water is only going up and down. What appears to move outward is the wave, not the water. So this kind of philosophical argument says that our seeming to go along in a course of time does not really happen.
The Buddhists say that suffering exists, but no one who suffers. Deeds exist, but no doers are found. A path there is, but no one follows it. And nirvana is, but no one attains it. In this way, they look upon the continuity of life as the same sort of illusion that is produced when you take a cigarette and whirl it in the dark and create the illusion of the circle, whereas there is only the one point of fire. The argument, then, is that so long as you are in the present there aren't any problems. The problems exist only when you allow presents to amalgamate. There is a way of putting this in Chinese that is rather interesting. They have a very interesting sign-it's pronounced nin (nen in Japanese). The top part of the character means "now" and the bottom part means "the mind heart," the shin. And so, this is, as it were, an instant of thought. In Chinese they use this character as the equivalent for the Sanskrit word inana. Then, if you double this character and put it twice or three times, nin, nin, nin-it means "thought after thought after thought." The Zen master joshu was once asked, "What is the mind of the child?" He said, "A ball in a mountain stream." He was asked, "What do you mean by a ball in a mountain stream?" Joshua said, "Thought after thought after thought with no block." He was using, of course, the mind of the child as the innocent mind, the mind of a person who is enlightened. One thought follows
another without hesitation. The thought arises; it does not wait to arise. When you clap your hands, the sound issues without hesitation. When you strike flint, the spark comes out; it does not wait to come out. That means that there's no block.
So, "thought, thought, thought"-nin, nin, nin describes what we call in our world the stream of consciousness. Blocking consists in letting the stream become connected, or chained together in such a way that when the present thought arises, it seems to be dragging its past, or resisting its future by saying, "I don't want to go." When the connection, or the dragging of these thoughts, stops, you have broken the chain of karma. If you think of this in comparison with certain problems in music it is very interesting, because when we listen to music, we hear melody only because we remember the sequence. We hear the intervals between the tones, but more than that, we remember the tones that led up to the one we are now hearing. We are trained musically to anticipate certain consequences, and to the extent that we get the consequences, we anticipate it, we feel that we understand the music. But to the extent that the composer does not adhere to the rules-and gives us unexpected consequences-we feel that we don't understand the music. If he gives us harmonic relationships that we are trained not to accept, or expect, we say, "Well this man is just writing garbage." Of course, it becomes apparent that the perception of music and the ability to hear melody will depend upon a relationship between past, present, and future sounds. You might Say, "Well, you're talking about a way of living that would be equivalent to listening to music with a tonedeaf mind so that you would eliminate the melody and have only noise. In your Taoist way of life, you would eliminate all meaning and have only senseless present Moments." Up to a point that is true; that is, in a way, what Buddhists also mean by seeing things in their suchness.
What is so bad about dying, for example? It's really no problem. When you die, you just drop dead, and that's all there is to it. But what makes it a problem is that you are dragging a past. And all those things you have done, all those achievements you've made and all these relationships and people that you've accumulated as your friends have to go. It isn't here now. A few friends might be around you, but all the past that identifies you as who you are (which is simply memory) has to go, and we feel just terrible about that. If we didn't, if we were just dying and that's all, death would not be a problem. Likewise, the chores of everyday life become intolerable when everything-all the past and futureties together and you feel it dragging at you every way. Supposing you wake up in the morning and it's a lovely morning. Let's take today, right here and now-here we are in this paradise of a place and some of us have to go to work on Monday. Is that a problem? For many people it is because it spoils the taste of what is going on now. When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we have to jump that day, immediately we feel sad, bored, and bothered. Whereas, actually, we're just lying in bed.
So, the Taoist trick is simply, "Live now and there will be no problems." That is the meaning of the Zen saying, "When you are hungry, eat. When you are tired, sleep. When you walk, walk. When you sit, sit." Rinzai, the great Tung dynasty master, said, "In the practice of Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Sleep when you're tired, move your bowels, eat when you're hungry-that's all. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand." The meaning of the wonderful Zen saying "Every day is a good day" is that they come one after another, and yet there is only this one. You don't link them. This, as I intimated just a moment ago, seems to be an atomization of life. Things just do what they do. The flower goes puff, and people go this way and that way, and so on, and that is what is happening. It has no meaning, no destination, no value. It is just like that. When you see that, you see it's a great relief. That is all it is. Then, when you are firmly established in suchness, and it is just this moment, you can begin again to play with the connections, only you have seen through them. Now they don't haunt you, because you know that there isn't any continuous you running on from moment to moment who originated sometime in the past and will die sometime in the future. All that has disappeared. So, you can have enormous fun anticipating the future, remembering the past, and playing all kinds of continuities. This is the meaning of that famous Zen saying about mountains: "To the naive man, mountains are mountains, waters are waters. To the intermediate student, mountains are no longer mountains, waters are no longer waters." In other words, they have dissolved into the point instant, the tsbana. "But for the fully perfected student, mountains are again mountains and waters are again waters."
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