RELIGION OF NO-RELIGION

CHAPTER THREE

Previously I have discussed the bodhisattva doctrine in Mahayana Buddhism and have related it to the two great tendencies in Indian spirituality: antiworldliness—or otherworldliness—and world affirmation. I have shown that the highest kind of buddha is in a certain way a non-buddha.

The highest kind of buddha is like an ordinary person. This comes out clearly in various tendencies in Zen. For example, all the paintings characteristic of Zen Buddhism in the Chinese and Japanese traditions are secular. They have a nonreligious atmosphere about them, whereas the paintings of the older Japanese Shingon and Tendai sects are religious paintings; you can tell at once that the subject matter of these paintings is religious. But with Zen painting the way of dealing with philosophical or spiritual themes is secular.

This ordinary quality is apparent in the works of Sengai, a Zen monk from seventeenth-century Japan. When an artist like Sengai paints the Buddha, there is something slightly humorous about the image of the Buddha. He wears his halo over one ear, and there is an informality to him, a slight raffishness. This style comes from China, from those great Sung dynasty artists like Liangkai, who painted the sixth patriarch of Zen chopping bamboo, looking like an unkempt country oaf. The greatest Zen painting has as its subject matter themes that are not really religious at all. It uses pine branches, rocks, bamboos, and grasses, and you would never know that these were religious icons.

Likewise in poetry, which we will go into more extensively later. A superb expression of Zen poetry is derived from the Chinese poet Layman Pang, who says, “Wondrous action, supernatural power, chopping wood and carrying water.” That is a little bit too religious for Zen taste, however. Preferable is Bashō’s famous poem, “The old pond; a frog jumps in. Plop.” “Plop” is the best English translation for the Japanese mizu no oto, which means, literally, “the water’s sound.” That is a very high-style Zen poem, because it has nothing in it about religion. There is another poem by Bashō that says, “When the lightning flashes, how admirable, he who does not think life is fleeting.” The flash of lightning is a Buddhist cliche for the transiency of the world, that life goes by and disappears as fast as a flash of lightning. How admirable, the poet is saying, not to be trapped by a cliche.

All religious comments about life eventually become cliches. Religion is always falling apart and promoting lip service and imitation. The imitation of Christ, for instance, is a perfect example. It is a terrible idea because everyone who imitates Christ becomes a kind of fake Jesus. In the same way, there are all kinds of imitation Buddhas in Buddhism, not only sitting on gilded wooden altars but sitting around in the monasteries, too. One might say that the highest kind of religious or spiritual attainment shows no sign that it is religious or spiritual. As a metaphor for this, there is in Buddhism the idea of the tracks of birds in the sky. Birds do not leave tracks, and so the way of the enlightened man is like the tracks of a bird in the sky. As a Chinese poem says, “Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass. Entering the water, he does not make a ripple.”

In other words, there is no sign about the spiritually advanced to indicate that they are self-consciously religious. Nor are they self-conscious about giving the world no sign of their advanced spiritual state. They are not like Protestants, self-consciously proud of their simplicity, criticizing the Catholics with their rituals. Historically, however, the real reason Protestants think Catholic rituals are insincere is that they are expensive. Protestantism started in the burgher cities of Europe, places like Augsburg, Hamburg, and Geneva, where the merchant class, who were the foundation of the bourgeoisie, were annoyed because every time a saint’s day came around all their employees got a day off to attend mass. There were so many of these nuisance holy days, as well as numerous contributions assessed by the church to pay for masses for the dead and to buy one’s way out of purgatory, that the merchants found this very uneconomical. The priests were getting the money instead of them, so they decried as unbiblical, irreligious, and wasteful all the finery of the Catholic religion, and sought a plain and simple alternative. In the course of time it became a sign of being genuinely religious to avoid rituals and colorful clothing and splendor in churches, and to be as ordinary as possible. But this is not an example of the way real religion gives no sign of being religious, because this simplicity and absence of ritual was itself a sign of piety; it was a way of advertising how spiritual one was.

The true bodhisattva does not leave a track of any kind, either by being overtly religious or by being overtly nonreligious.

But how can you be neither religious nor nonreligious? That is the great test. How can you avoid that trap of being one or the other? It is similar to the question, Are you a theist or an atheist? The theist is caught by God, and the idea of God or the belief in God, but the atheist is equally caught. If, for instance, an atheist is an atheist because he cannot stand the idea that God is watching him all the time—that there is an all-seeing eye prying into his most private life—then he is as trapped by his opposition to God as a theist is caught by his idea of God. Atheists who advertise their disbelief in God are very pious people. Nobody believes in God like an atheist: “There is no God, and I am His prophet.” The true bodisattva state is very difficult to pin down. It is neither supremely religious nor blatantly secular. It is a very subtle state. Everyone misses the point. Even people who think that the height of Buddhism or Zen is to be perfectly ordinary have still missed the point.

There is an element of the nonreligious in the art, the painting, and the poetry that has been inspired by the appearance of ordinariness in Buddhist saints. Nevertheless, there is something about the way in which this nonreligious subject matter is handled that stops you. You know there is something strange about it. This is how I first became interested in Oriental philosophy. I had an absolute fascination for Chinese and Japanese secular painting—the landscapes, the treatment of flowers and grasses and bamboos. There was something about that treatment that struck me as astonishing, even though the subject matter was extremely ordinary. Even as a child I had to find out what the strange element in those bamboos and grasses was. I was, of course, being taught by those painters to see grass, but there was something else in their paintings that I could never put my finger on. That “something else” was this thing that I will call the religion of no-religion. It is the supreme attainment of a buddha: it cannot be detected; it leaves no trace.

Some of you have seen the paintings of the Ten Stages of Spiritual Ox-herding. There are two sets of these paintings: a heterodox sequence and an orthodox. In the heterodox sequence, as the man catches the ox, the ox becomes progressively whiter, until in the end it disappears altogether. The last picture is of an empty circle. But the orthodox set of paintings does not end with the empty circle. The image of the empty circle is followed by two others. After the man has attained the state of emptiness—the state of no attachment to any spiritual or psychological or moral crutch—there follow two more steps. The first is called “Returning to the Origin.” It is represented by a tree beside a stream. The last is called “Entering the City With Gift-bestowing Hands.” It shows a picture of the Buddha Putai, in Japanese known as Hotei, who has an enormous belly, big ears, and carries around a colossal bag. What do you think his bag has in it? Trash, wonderful trash. Everything that children love. Things that everybody else has thrown away, and thought of as valueless, this Buddha collects and gives away to children. The saying is, “He goes on his way without following the steps of the ancient sages. His door is closed”—that is, the door of his house—“and no glimpses of his interior life are to be seen.”

In other words, when you erect a building, you have to put all kinds of scaffolding up. This shows that building is going on. When the building is complete, however, the scaffolding is taken down. The scaffolding is religion. To open a door, as they say in Zen, you may need to knock on it with a brick. But when the door is open, you do not carry the brick inside. Similarly, to cross a river you need a boat, but when you have reached the other side, you do not pick up the boat and carry it across the land on your back. The brick, the boat, the scaffolding, all represent religious technology, or method, and in the end these are all to disappear. The saint will not be found in church. However, do not take what I say literally. The saint can perfectly readily go to church without being sullied by church. It is ordinary people who too frequently come out of church stinking of religion.

A disciple once asked a great Zen master, “Am I making progress?”

He said, “You’re doing all right, but you have a trivial fault.”

“What is that?”

“You have too much Zen.”

“Well,” the student said, “when you’re studying Zen, don’t you think it’s very natural to be talking about it?”

The master said, “When it is like an ordinary conversation, it is much better.”

Another monk who was standing by, listening to this exchange, said to the master, “Why do you so dislike talking about Zen?”

The master replied, “Because it turns one’s stomach.”

What did he mean when he said that it is better to talk about Zen when it is like an ordinary, everyday conversation? When the old master Joshu was asked, “At the end of the present epoch of history, when everything will be destroyed in fire, one thing will remain. What will it be?” Joshu replied, “It’s windy again this morning.”

In Zen when you are asked a question about religion you reply in terms of the secular. When you are asked about something secular, you reply in terms of religion: “What is the eternal nature of the self?” “It is windy again this morning.”

When a student asked his master to hand him a knife, the master handed it to him blade first. The student said, “Please give me the other end.” “What would you do with the other end?” the master asked. Do you see? The disciple started out with the ordinary and suddenly found himself involved in a metaphysical problem. But if he’d started out with the metaphysical, he would have found himself involved with the knife.

To go deeply into the religion of no-religion we have to understand what might be called the final, ultimate attainment of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. This is contained in a school of thought that is called in Chinese Huayen, and in Japanese Kegon. Kegon is the intellectual foundation for Zen. There was a great Chinese master by the name of Tsungmi, or Shumitsu in Japanese, who was simultaneously a Zen master and the fifth patriarch of the Chinese Huayen sect. Hua means “flower”; yen, “garland.” The Garland of Flowers is a lengthy Sanskrit sutra called the Avatamsaka; in Japanese it is called the Kegon-kyo. One subject of this vast and visionary sutra is what are called the four dharma worlds, and I will explain what these four worlds are.

First there is a level of being that is called ji in Japanese, shih in Chinese. This is the world of things and events. It is what you might call the commonsense world, the everyday world that our senses normally record. The Chinese character shih has a multiplicity of meanings. It can mean a thing or an event, and it can mean important business. It can mean affectation, putting something on or showing off. A person who is a master in Zen is called buji, which means “no business, no affectation, nothing special.” A poem says, “On Mount Lu there is misty rain, and the River Zhe is at high tide. When you have not been there, your heart is filled with longing. But when you have been there and come back, it was nothing special. Misty rain on a mountain. A river at high tide.”

This “nothing special” is buji. We feel that when something is nothing special it must be ordinary. But buji does not mean ordinary. It means, paradoxically—to our ears—that the mountain and river were nothing special in the same way that individuals with no religion can be the most truly religious of all. They are not just common, ignorant people, though they may appear that way. You have to know what they know to recognize them for who and what they are. The “nothing special” of buji means that the inner specialness does not stick out like a sore thumb. So the world of ji is in general the world of particulars, the world of multiplicity. It is the world we ordinarily feel we are living in, and it is the first of the four dharma worlds.

The second dharma world is called the world of ri in Japanese; in Chinese, li. In Chinese this character means the markings in jade, the grain in wood, the fiber in muscle; the organic principle of order. In the Huayen philosophy, the word li or ri means the universal that underlies all particulars, the unity underlying all multiplicity, the unitive principle, as distinct from shih, or ji, which is the differentiation principle.

When you first see into the nature of the world, you start from ji. You begin by noticing all the particular things in the world and by being baffled by their multiplicity, and by dealing with the multiplicity of things. But as you progress in understanding, you become aware of the relationship each thing has to the other, and eventually you see the unity that lies behind them. The multiplicity of the world dissolves into unity.

At this point you encounter a problem. You can see the world as a unity and you can see it as a multiplicity. But how the devil are you to put those two visions together? If you are to be a practical success in business, in family life, and so on, you have to pay attention to the world of particulars. It is particulars that matter. You have to know chalk from cheese. But if you become a saint, a monk, or a hermit—or perhaps even a poet or an artist—then you will have to forget about the practical matters and contemplate the unity, the secret meaning underlying all events. But then all the practical people are going to say, “You’re falling down on the job. You’re avoiding life.” They feel that the world of particulars is the only real world. But the saint will say, “Your particulars are not real. You make a success of things, but it is only a temporary success. You think you’re an important person, you’re really contributing to human life, but actually your success will last for only a few years and then you will fall apart like everybody else. When you’re dead, where will your success be then?” From the standpoint of the person who concentrates on the underlying unity of the world, such success isn’t real.

To solve the problem of unifying the visions of the first two dharma worlds, we have to go to the third of these worlds, which is called ri ji muge. The name of this world is formed from the names of the first two, combined with muge, meaning “no block.” It means that between ri and ji there is no blockage; there is no obstruction between the world’s unity and its particulars. The world of the universal and the world of particulars are not incompatible. To demonstrate this, let’s take two very different things—for example, shape and color—and see how they can be united. A shape can never be a color, a color can never be a shape, but shape and color can be joined in a single object. Think of color and shape as the first two dharma worlds. They can be united in an object—such as a circle—to form, metaphorically, the third dharma world.

The properly rounded person is an embodiment of the third dharma world, is both spiritual and material, is both otherworldly and worldly. This is the supreme attainment of a human being, to be fully both worldly and otherworldly, to avoid the extreme of one-sidedness. The person who is just a materialist ends up by being very boring. You can live the successful life of the world and own every kind of material refinement, have the most beautiful home, the most delicious food, the most marvelous yachts and cars, but if you have no touch of the mystical about you, material success will eventually become perfectly boring, and you will get tired of it. On the other hand, there are people who are purely spiritual, who live in a dry world where all luxury has been scrubbed away, and they are very intense people. When you are in the presence of an excessively spiritual person, you feel inclined to sit on the edge of your chair. You are not at ease.

It is always puzzling to people brought up in a Western environment that, in the East, great spiritual people are often quite sensuous. They cannot be materialists in the ordinary sense, but neither can they be the kind of straightforward sensualists who use the world purely for their own pleasure. The world is too wonderful for that. Human beings, for instance, are too marvelous to be treated as merely sensual objects. A person may indeed be very sexual, but they are also, in addition, so wonderful that one has to stop and delve into the wholeness of their marvelous personality, as well as into their sensual qualities.

A problem with sensuality keeps recurring in the West. For instance, one goes to a church with a fine clergyman who is idolized, the very exemplar of life, and then suddenly there develops a frightful scandal; he has an affair with his secretary, for instance.

When this happens, a Westerner tends to think that all is lost, the faith has been sold out, and everything is going to wrack and ruin, all because the clergyman was not purely spiritual but also had a hidden sensual side. In the West we frequently see this kind of one-sidedness—of excessive materialism or spirituality—because in our world we tend to make the spiritual and the material mutually exclusive. But in the third dharma world of ri ji muge, we see that there is no separation between the spiritual and the material.

The attainment of this world might seem to be the highest possible achievement. But there is still one more world beyond it, which is called ji ji muge. Suddenly ri, the world of unity, has disappeared, but between ji and ji—particular and particular—there is still no obstruction. Between one event and any other event or events there is no mutual exclusiveness, nothing that need be united with an underlying unity. This is the highest doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism. It is the idea of the mutual interpenetration of all things, or the mutual interdependence of all things. Its symbol is Indra’s net, the principle of which is elaborated in the Avatamsaka sutra.

Imagine at dawn a multidimensional spider’s web covered with dew, a vast spider’s web that is the whole cosmos. It exists in four, five, six, or more dimensions, and at every intersection of web are rainbow-colored jewels of dew on which are reflected every other drop of dew, and therefore also the reflections of all the other drops of dew, and also the reflections of the reflections, and so on, ad infinitum.

This is the Mahayana vision of the world. No thing, no event, can exist without every other thing or event. Every event implies all events; every event—the total universe, past, present, future—depends on every particular event or thing. It is easy to say, “I depend on the universe. There could be no me unless there was everything else.” It is harder to see the corollary, that the whole universe depends on you. “After all,” you might say, “before I was born the universe was here, and after I die I’m sure it will go on. How can it be said, then, that the whole universe depends on me?” Very simply: without your parents you would not have come into being. For you to exist it was necessary for your parents to exist. That necessity doesn’t change when they die. Therefore you depend on your parents even when they have gone. In the same way the universe will still depend on you, on your having been here, even when you disappear. And if you have not yet been born, it depends on your future arrival here. The fact that you exist tells us something about the kind of universe we’re living in: it once produced you. You are a symptom of the kind of universe we’re living in, just as an apple is a symptom of a certain kind of tree. It tells us something about that tree, what its function is. A world that produces a John Doe, who is nobody in particular, who is not even remembered by anybody, nevertheless depends on him, despite his obscurity, for its existence, just as it depends equally on every fruit fly, every gnat, every vibration of every gnat’s wing, on every last electron in every last gnat’s wing—on every one of its manifestations—however brief those manifestations may be.

What I am saying is that everything that exists implies everything else, and all those other things, collectively, in their totality—which we call the universe—in turn imply each individual object and event. That is the meaning of Indra’s net. When you have a chain and you pick up a link, all the other links come up with it, and this is called in Zen, “to take up a blade of grass and use it as a golden Buddha, sixteen feet high.” There is no such thing as a single, solitary event. The only possible single event is all events whatsoever. That could be regarded as the only possible atom; the only possible single thing is everything. The manifestations of the universe that we call things all imply each other. We know what we are only in relation to what we are not. We know the sensation of the self only in relation to a sensation of the other. The self implies the other as the back implies the front. However short or long it may be, everything depends on your life. If you did not happen, nothing would happen. The whole world bears your signature, and it would not be the same world if you weren’t in it.

Have you heard of the pathetic fallacy? This was a nineteenth-century idea that asserted that it is false and illegitimate to project human feelings onto the world. The wind in the pine trees is not sighing; you are projecting sighing onto the sound. The sun is not happy; you are projecting your own happiness onto the shining sun. The sun has no feeling; the sun is not human. The wind has no feeling; it is not human. The poet may say, “The moon doth with delight look around her when the heavens are bare.” But the logician will answer: “No, it is the poet who is looking around with delight at the moon in the bare heavens.” How awful. If that were true, it would be better to ban poetry from the world. But actually the moon does look around with delight when the poet does, because the same world that manifests itself as the moon also manifests itself as the poet. They go together. A world where there is a moon implies a world where there is a poet. A world where there is a poet implies a world where there is a moon. So, through the agency of the poet, the moon can in fact be said to look around with delight. You cannot separate poet and moon without destroying the universe, any more than you can separate head and feet without destroying the body. In that sense then this whole world is a human world. We should not take seriously the silly idea of the pathetic fallacy, which says that outside our skins everything is inhuman—a mass of dumb and blind forces—and that only inside the skin is there a human world. All the world is human, and it depends not only on the existence of humanity in general but also on every individual in particular.

The whole world is covered, as it were, with your personal signature. However, the moment you see yourself as central to the existence of the universe, you will suddenly see the obverse of this as well: that your particular personality is nothing at all without the existence of everything else and everybody else. In order for me to be Alan Watts I need every single other human being, including their uncontrollable otherness. They are going to be themselves whatever I do, and I depend on all their differences from me, and they all depend, likewise, on my differences from them. So I am in a very funny position. The moment I would be egoless and say, “I am nothing without you,” I find that I am the kingpin: they all depend on me. And when I get swell-headed about being the kingpin, I discover I am nothing at all without them. The moment you think you’re in one state, that state transforms itself into its opposite. That is ji ji muge, the fourth dharma world. In it everybody is the boss and nobody is. The whole thing takes care of itself. In this sense the world is a colossal democracy, and every man, every nightingale, every snail, is king in this world and commoner at the same time. That’s how it works.

There is no great king. In Hinduism they do have what is to us a very strange idea called Ishvara. This is the supreme personal god, the top being in the deva world. Many Buddhists also believe in such a god or ruler of the universe, but they think that he is lower than a buddha, because, like all gods and all angels, but unlike a buddha, he is still subject to the round of being and will eventually dissolve into nothing. This is a very curious idea to our minds. Buddhists believe in this kind of supreme god, but they do not believe that that god is particularly important. There are no shrines in Buddhism to Ishvara.

So it is this idea of the mutual interpenetration and interdependence of all things that is the philosophical basis for Zen as a practical, nonintellectual way of life. Because the most ordinary events or things—charcoal brazier, mat, soup for dinner, sneezing, washing hands, going to the bathroom—all imply, despite their separateness, the unity of the universe. That is why Zen people use ordinary events to demonstrate cosmic and metaphysical principles. They do not rationalize it in this way, however. To see infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour is still ri ji muge, not ji ji muge. Ji ji muge is when you offer somebody the grain of sand without thinking about eternity. There is no difference between the grain of sand and eternity. You do not have to think about eternity as something implied by the grain of sand. The grain of sand is eternity. In exactly the same way, our sitting here at this moment is not something different from nirvana. We are in nirvana sitting here exactly as we are. You do not have to make any philosophical comment on the grain of sand or on our sitting here. Comment is unnecessary. Such comment is called “legs on a snake” or “beard on a eunuch.” Putting legs on a snake embarrasses the snake; a eunuch does not need a beard. In our idiom we say, “Don’t gild the lily.” Zen says, “Do not put frost on top of snow.”

All specifically religious activity is “legs on a snake.” Eventually religion will be eliminated, just as, eventually, when every individual becomes self-governing and able to relate properly to his brother, the state will vanish. That is why in the Book of Revelation, in the New Testament, it is said that in heaven there is no temple. The whole place is the temple. Similarly, when we achieve the fulfillment of Buddhism, there will be no Buddha, no temple, no gong, no bell, because the whole world is the sound of the bell, and the image of Buddha is everything you see.

A Zen master was asked, “Mountains and hills, are they not all forms of the body of Buddha?” The master replied, “Yes they are, but it’s a pity to say so.”