BUDDHISM AS DIALOGUE

CHAPTER FOUR

I want to proceed now with a discussion of the particular subset of Mahayana Buddhism that is known as Zen Buddhism.

Zen plays a little game with you. Whenever I or somebody like D. T. Suzuki talks about Zen, all the others say that because we’re talking about it we do not understand it. In the words of Lao-tzu, “Those who know do not say; those who say do not know,” and though he said that, he wrote a book of eighty chapters or so to explain the Tao and the te, its power. We can’t help ourselves; we’ve got to talk. Human beings are chatterboxes. When we have something on our minds, we have to talk about it, even if we can’t say what we mean.

Poetry is the great language. It is the art of saying what cannot be said. Every poet knows that he is trying to describe the indescribable. Every poet knows that nothing is describable. Whether you take some sort of ineffable mystical experience at one extreme, or an ordinary rusty nail at the other, nothing is really describable. In the words of the famous Count Korzybski, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t.”

There used to be a professor at Northwestern who would produce a matchbook in front of his class and say, “What is this?” The students would say, “A match-book.” And he would say, “No, no, no. ‘Matchbook’ is a noise. Is this a noise? What is it really?” And to answer this, he would throw it at them. That is what it was.

So nothing can really be described, and yet we all know perfectly well what we mean when we talk. If you have shared an experience with somebody else, then of course you can talk about it. We can all talk about fire and air and water and wood because we know what they are, and there is no mystery. In the same way, something so esoteric as Zen can be discussed. Zen people play games or little tricks, however, and test each other. I remember the first time I met Paul Reps, who wrote that lovely book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. He said to me, “You’ve written quite a number of books by now, you must think you’re pretty fancy.” I said, “I haven’t said a word.” This is simply a Zen game where people feel each other out. A poem says, “When two Zen masters meet each other on the road, they need no introduction; thieves recognize one another instantaneously.”

If I were to give you a truly proper and educated talk about Zen, I would gather you around and sit here in silence for five minutes and leave. This would be a much more direct exposition of it than what I am going to do instead, which is to talk about it. I am afraid that you would feel disappointed and somewhat cheated if I just left after five minutes of silence though.

The word zen is the Japanese way of mispronouncing the Chinese word chan which, in turn, is the Chinese way of mispronouncing the Sanskrit word dhyana. Dhyana is a very difficult if not impossible word to translate into English. It has been called meditation, but meditation in English generally means sitting quietly and thinking about something, and that is not what Zen is. Contemplation might come a little nearer if you use the word in the very technical sense that is still used among Catholic mystics. Contemplation, as we normally use the word, has a sense of inactivity, a sense of not doing anything but being completely still and passive. Zen, however, is something highly active. So we really do not have an English word for dhyana, Chan, or Zen.

But I would say that we do know what Zen is, because we do all sorts of things every day of our lives in the spirit of Zen. For example, most Americans have driven cars since they were teenagers and are very expert drivers. And when they drive a car, they do not think about it; they are one with the car. Similarly, an expert horse rider is one with the horse. When you watch a good cowboy or cavalry rider, he’s glued to the horse, almost like a centaur. As the horse moves, he moves. Which is in control? Is the horse riding the man or the man riding the horse? You really don’t know. The same is true when you have an excellent dancing partner; who leads? Who follows? It seems as if you are one body and you move together. That is Zen.

In a wider sense, when a person does not react to life, on the one hand, or tries to dominate it, on the other, but allows the internal world of his own organism and the external world of other people and other things to move together as if they were one and the same motion, that is Zen. So you could say in a very simple way that the real concern of Zen is to realize—not merely rationally but in one’s bones—that the world inside your skin and the world outside your skin are all one world and one being, one self. And you are it.

Once you know that, you have abolished all the problems that arise when you feel that you are a stranger in the world, set down in the middle of an alien world, surrounded by lifeless galaxies that are inhabited by strange people. This whole sense of estrangement from a foreign world is overcome in Zen.

I will illustrate this, before we go into Zen in any kind of technical way, with a few rather superficial but nevertheless significant facts out of Japanese culture and the place of Zen in it. Japanese culture is extraordinarily ritualistic. There is a right way of doing everything, a good form, a proper style. Nowhere is this more apparent than in such practices as the tea ceremony or flower arrangement, or in knowing how to dress or how to organize a formal dinner. The punctiliousness and skill of these people in doing these things is quite remarkable. But to the same degree that they are very skillful at doing these things, they are very worried about them. For example, the whole question of bringing presents to somebody is of great concern. Have they given us more than we have given them? Did we remember this or that occasion? These questions weigh very heavily on the Japanese soul. The debt that you owe to your parents, the debt that you owe to your country and to your emperor, are immeasurable, infinite debts that never can be paid. These weigh very heavily. Therefore Japan—until the partial breakaway of modern youth, with its Westernized ideals—has had a very nervous culture, concerned about whether one is playing the ritual correctly.

A culture like that needs an outlet, a safety valve, and Zen provides just that. So when you meet a Japanese person who is thoroughly trained in Zen, he has a different kind of personality altogether when compared with his countryman who is not trained in Zen. His manners are not studiedly courteous, nor is he brusque, but he is simply at ease. He gives you his whole attention, so long as you give him your whole attention. If your attention starts wandering, though, he has work to do and promptly leaves. But so long as you are wanting to talk to him, he is there for you and for nobody else. He sits down, and he really sits, unworried about whether he ought to be somewhere else. He is able to sit in one place with complete serenity. If you have half an idea that you ought to be worrying about something out in the garden, or that you ought to be cooking dinner, or that you ought to be down in your office, you cannot sit where you are. You are not really there. You are a kind of helium balloon that keeps wanting to wander off. But when you meet people connected with Zen you see they are grounded. Even the most neophyte, novice priest, has this atmosphere of knowing how to live in the present without being fidgety or giggly or worrying about whether he has done the right thing, and that is very much the Zen style.

Although Zen people do have a very exacting and demanding discipline, the function of this discipline is rather curious: it is to enable them to be comfortable. It is to enable them, for example, to be able to sleep on a concrete sidewalk on a cold, wet night and enjoy it. It is to enable them to be able to relax completely under any situation or hardship. Ordinarily, if you sit out in the cold, you will start shivering. This is because you will be resisting the cold, tightening your muscles against it. But Zen discipline teaches you to do something else, to take it easy, go with the cold, relax.

All those monks in monasteries in Japan are cold as hell in winter. And they simply sit there, most of the time. We would feel frozen to death and miserable, and would start coming down with influenza and pneumonia, but they simply relax and learn how to accept the cold. There is nothing about Zen discipline that is masochistic, however. It has nothing to do with the idea that you must beat your body because your body is bad because it is the creation of the devil. It simply teaches the disciple how to be comfortable under all circumstances. But all of this is rather incidental to the main question of Zen.

The Zen people, as you meet them and get to know their personality style, are at ease in a culture that is not at ease but instead is chronically concerned with protocol. Japanese culture is a terribly self-conscious culture. Everybody is always watching themselves and having second thoughts about everything. This becomes tiresome. The discipline of Zen emerged out of this situation as a method for enabling students of Zen to act without watching themselves; to act unself-consciously, we would say. The Japanese are terrified of this kind of action, as are we. They, and we too, think, “If I don’t watch myself constantly I will make a mistake. If I don’t hold a club over my own head, I will cease to be civilized; I will become a barbarian. If I don’t discipline myself and repress those passions of mine, I will become like the monk from Siberia who burst from his cell one day and devoured the father superior.”

Our basic mistrust of our own spontaneity makes us wonder whether the Zen people are really spontaneous. If they do not plan and premeditate and hold clubs over themselves, won’t they become very dangerous people socially? Won’t they go out and rape their mothers and daughters, and murder their grandmothers to inherit their fortunes, and so forth? Zen people just do not do that, of course, and yet they really are perfectly spontaneous. To show how this can be, I will try to indicate how this discipline called Zen actually works. This will involve letting the cat out of the bag a little bit, but that cannot be helped.

Let us go back to what is fundamental to Buddhism. Buddhism is unlike Western religions in that it does not tell you anything. It does not require you to believe in anything. It is a dialogue. The teachings of Buddhism are nothing more than the opening phrases or exchanges in that dialogue.

Buddhism is a dialogue between a buddha and an ordinary man, or rather, between a buddha and another buddha who insists on defining himself as an ordinary man, thereby creating a problem. There is a saying that “anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.” In exactly the same way, in the Buddhist culture, anybody who goes to a guru, a spiritual teacher, a Zen master, or whatever, ought to have his head examined. As the old Chinese master Tokusan put it, “If you ask any question, you get thirty blows with my stick. If you don’t ask any question, you get thirty blows just the same.” In other words, “What the hell are you doing here defining yourself as a student and me as a teacher?” You raise a problem when you do that, and in the Zen way of training, this problem is very clearly emphasized.

If you go to a Zen teacher and approach him in the traditional way, the first thing he will do is say, “I haven’t anything to teach. Go away.”

You may say, “What are these people doing around here? Aren’t they your students?”

He will answer, “They are working with me. But unfortunately we are very poor these days. We don’t have enough rice to go around. We can’t make ends meet as it is. We cannot take on anybody else in this community.”

So you have to insist on being taken in. Every postulant for Zen training assumes immediately that the teacher has given him the brush-off in order to test his sincerity. In other words, “If you really want this thing, you have got to work for it.” That is not the real point. The point is that you have got to make such a fuss to get in that you cannot withdraw gracefully after having made such a fuss. You put yourself on the spot and define yourself as somebody needing help, or as somebody with a problem who needs a master in order to be helped out of the problem. In the old days—and it is still the rule today among the Zen monasteries of Japan—a postulant who wanted to come into a monastery had to sit outside the gate for five days, in a position of supplication, with head bowed down on the steps. The monks inside would let him in at night because they must give hospitality to any wandering monk, but he was expected not to sleep any of those five nights but to sit in meditation. You sit, and you sit, and you sit there, making a fool of yourself and saying, “I insist on being admitted into this monastery. I insist on learning the secret of the master here.” The master has already told you that he does not have a secret and that he does not teach anything. But you insist that he does.

This is the situation of everyone who feels that life is a problem to be solved. Whether you seek to solve that problem through psychoanalysis, integration, salvation, or buddhahood, you define yourself in a certain way when you see life as a problem to be solved.

The real desire that everybody brings to these teachers can be stated in this way: “Teacher, I want to get one up on the universe. I feel I am a stranger in this world and that life is a problem. Having a body means that I am subject to disease and change and death. Having emotions and passions means that I am tormented by feelings I cannot help having, and yet it is not possible to act on those feelings without creating trouble. I feel trapped by this world and so I want to get the better of it. Is there some wise man around who is a master of life and who can teach me to cope with all this?” That is what everybody is looking for in a teacher: a savior who can show you how to cope with life. But the Zen teacher says, “I don’t have any answers.” Nobody believes that because he seems to be so confident when you look at him. You cannot believe that he has no answers, and yet the consistent teaching of Zen is that it has nothing to say and nothing to teach.

A great Chinese master of the Tang dynasty, called Linji in Chinese, or Rinzai in Japanese, said, “Zen is like using a yellow leaf to stop a child crying. A child is crying for gold and the father takes an autumn leaf that is yellow and calls it gold.” He also said that it is like using an empty fist to deceive a child. You have a closed fist and you say to the child, “What have I got here?” And the child says, “Let me see!” You put your fist behind your back, and the child becomes more and more excited to know what the devil is inside that fist, and fights and fights and finally is practically in tears, and then suddenly you open the fist and there is nothing inside.

This is how it is for the person who is under the impression that life is a problem to be solved. The secret is dressed up in a big way: to know it is to be a buddha; it is to know the answer, to solve the problem, to get the message, to get the word, to be in control of fate and the world. Who wouldn’t want that?

All these powers are projected on the Zen master: he is a buddha, a master of life. But if he is a master of life, the reason for that is that he has discovered the unreality of the whole problem of life. There is not life on the one hand and you on the other. You and life are the same. But you cannot tell people that and just by telling it get them to see it.

People who know that the earth is flat cannot be reasoned with. It is absolutely impossible to reason with people who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. In the same way, we tend to know that we are each a separate “poor little me,” and that we are in need of salvation or something. We know this is so, and if somebody says, “You are not really separate from life; your feeling of separateness is an illusion,” that is all very nice—in theory—but we do not feel it.

So what will you do with a person who is convinced that the earth is flat? There is no way of reasoning with him. If it is for some reason important that he discover that the earth is round, you have got to play a game or trick on him. You tell him, “Great. The earth is flat. Let’s go and look over the edge; wouldn’t that be fun? Of course, if we are going to look over the edge of the earth, we must be very careful that we do not go around in circles or we will never get to the edge. So we must go along consistently westward, along a certain line of latitude. Then we will come to the edge of the earth.” In other words, in order to convince a flat-earther that the world is round, you have to make him act consistently on his own proposition by making him go consistently westward in search of the edge of the world. When at last, by going consistently westward, he comes back to the place where he started, he will have been convinced that the earth is at least cylindrical, and he may then take it on faith that if he goes north along a line of longitude, he will again eventually return to his starting place. What you must do is make him persist in his folly. That is the whole method of Zen: to make people become consistent, perfect egotists, and so explode the illusion of the separate ego.

When you finally convince the Zen master that you are stupid enough to be accepted as a student—by persisting in defining yourself as someone with a problem that he can solve for you, even through he has warned you well in advance that he has nothing to teach—he will then say, “I will now ask you a question.”

There are many ways of asking this question, but they all boil down to one common question, which is, “Who are you? You say you have a problem. You say you would like to get out of the sufferings of life and get one up on the universe. I want to know who is asking this question. Show me you.”

The master may put the question like this: “Before your father and mother conceived you, what was your original nature?” And they add, “I want to be shown. I do not want a lot of ideas from you about who you are. I do not want to know who you are in terms of a social role, college degrees, professional qualifications, your name, your family. All that is the past. I want to see the genuine you as you are right now.”

This is like saying to a person, “Don’t be self-conscious. I want you, right this minute, to be completely sincere.” Nothing is better calculated to make a person incapable of sincerity. It is as when a child’s relatives come, aunts and uncles, and the parents say, “Darling, come on now and show us how you have fun.” The poor child is completely nonplussed and does not know what to do. You cannot have fun on demand.

The context in which a Zen master interviews his students is very formal; there he sits, sort of an enthroned tiger, definitely an authority figure. He is the last person you can be spontaneous with, because you feel that he knows you through and through.

There is a story about a man who has a fight with a bear, and the bear is a mind reader and always knows what moves the man is going to make. So the man can never conquer the bear unless he makes a move that he does not think about first. You get the same feeling about a Zen master: that he is absolutely aware of everything phony about you, that he can read you like a book. In such a situation, you cannot find a way of being genuine.

Think about it this way: if we arrange a kind of group psychotherapy session in which a little game is being played, and the gimmick in this game is that when anybody says or does anything, everyone else will challenge its sincerity, then anything you do will make you anxious and self-conscious.

Thinking about thinking, and being aware of being aware, is what is called in Japanese “the observing self.” Watching yourself all the time, you become aware of your own hopelessness. The price that human beings pay for self-consciousness is anxiety and guilt. Anxiety asks, “When I left the house, did I turn off the stove? I remember turning it off, but can I trust my memory? Maybe I’d better go back and look.” “All right, I just went back and looked, but did I really see? Did I look properly? You know how the unconscious can alter your senses. I better go and look again.” You have trapped yourself in a vicious circle. You will never get away from the house. This risk of being trapped like this in a kind of feedback loop of consciousness is the penalty we pay for the gift of being able to know that we know.

The Zen trick is to put you into this situation in a very obvious way, to make you think about thinking about thinking about thinking. Or else—and this amounts to the same thing—to force you to make a very strong effort not to think. The latter of these techniques is zazen: sitting, letting your senses operate, being responsive to whatever may be around, but not thinking about it. Of course, this is still thinking. If I am thinking about not thinking, how will I stop thinking about not thinking? It is as though somebody came to you and put molasses in one of your hands and feathers in the other and slapped the two hands together, rubbed them around, then said, “Now pick off the feathers.”

The Zen teacher is well aware that he has played a trick on you, and now he is going to see how you will respond to that trick, what foolishness you will come up with, and then he will help you act consistently on that foolishness. His trick has simply been to do, as if in an experiment, what society does to us all the time. The high cultures of the world, whether of the East or the West, play a game on every new child. They do not know they are playing this game, because their forefathers played it on them, and they are its victims. The game is called the double bind: you are required to do something that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily. You must love me; you must go to sleep; you must be natural; you must be free. Listen to that: you must be free.

The society into which a child is born defines that child. We learn who we are by the way other people react to us. When they tell us, “You are an independent agent; you are responsible; you are a freely acting individual,” we take these statements to be commandments, and we seek to obey them because we cannot help it. A child has no way of criticizing this situation or of seeing. that there is something phony about it. Society defines the child as an independent agent and convinces him to believe in that, even though it is inaccurate. The child would not believe it if he were actually independent. The community has trouble getting children to behave as they want them to. Then they feel that there must be something innately ornery about children. They must be born in a state of original sin. And of course they are—in effect—because they have been defined by society in a self-contradictory way.

It is self-contradictory when a community says to a person, “You must be free,” or when members of a family say to each other, “You must love me; it’s your duty.” What a bunch of rot! If you say to your wife, “Darling, do you really love me?” and she replies, “I’m trying my very best to do so,” that will not be the answer you wanted. You wanted her to say, “Darling, I can’t help loving you. I love you so much I could eat you.” You do not want her to have to try to love you, and yet that is the burden you lay on people when you demand their love. In almost every marriage ceremony it is said that you must love your spouse. In Christianity it is said, “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God,” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” These are all double binds. Anybody who lives under the dominance of a double bind is living in a state of chronic frustration. He is devoting his life to solving a problem that is meaningless and nonsensical precisely because it has no solution.

The double bind that is the deepest of all is, You must go on living. Living is a spontaneous process, and an art, and to say to life, “You must happen,” is exactly the same as saying to any creative artist, “You must come through with the goods; tonight you must give a superb performance and, furthermore, you must be completely unself-conscious while you’re doing it.” This is being done to us all the time. The purpose of Zen is to make this double bind visible, so that you can see how stupid it is. The Zen teacher will be well aware of everything he is doing and what tricks he is playing on you, but he will play them anyway, because behind it all he has the compassionate intent of getting you into such a fierce double bind that you will see how stupid it is and let go of it. That is what he is doing when he commands, “Be genuine. Show me the real you.”

A friend who was studying Zen was given a koan like this to work on, and as he was going for his interview, walking through the garden that connected the sodo, the monks’ meditation hall and quarters, with the master’s room, he saw a big bullfrog. Bullfrogs in Japan are rather tame; people do not eat them. He swept it up and dropped it into the sleeve of his kimono, and when he got in front of the teacher to answer the koan, to spontaneously produce his genuine self, he produced the bullfrog. The teacher looked at it, shook his head, and said, “No, too intellectual.”

This is to say, “Your answer is too contrived, too studied—that is not you.” Do you see the bind that’s inherent in trying to be genuine? There is nothing you can do to be genuine. The more you do, the phonier you become. At the same time, you cannot give up trying to be genuine. The moment you do that, your abandonment of trying is itself an insidious form of trying.

There is a very interesting Hindu teacher by the name of Krishnamurti whom many of you may know about. He tells people that all of their religious inquiry, their yoga practices, their reading religious books, and so on, are nothing but the perpetuation of egocentricity on a very refined and highbrow level. Therefore he encourages disciples who studiously avoid reading any kind of philosophical or edifying book. They are reduced to reading mystery stories and they become devoted nondisciples. What a clever bind that is! It is the same as the Zen technique.

The way of Buddhism is to let go of yourself, to see that you live in a universe in which nothing can be grasped, and therefore to stop grasping. It is very simple, but here is the problem. You say to a teacher, “Teach me not to grasp.” He will say, “Why do you want to know?” You will answer, “Non-attachment is good Buddhist doctrine.” And he will show you that wanting to stop grasping is a new form of grasping. You feel that you can get one up on the world by being unattached to it. Just breathing is painful when somebody you love dies, so maybe by being unattached to that person I can avoid grief. Maybe when life comes and bangs on me, by not having an ego I can avoid life’s pain. That is why I want a non-ego state. It is a phony desire, though, just a new way of safeguarding and protecting the ego. This is an example of the manner in which the statements of Buddhism are not final teachings but are rather the opening strategies of a dialogue.

Going back to fundamental, primitive Buddhism, people said to the Buddha, “I want to escape from suffering.” That is a perfectly honest statement. All right, realize that suffering is caused by desire and try not to desire. The student goes away and tries to eliminate desire by controlling his mind and practicing yoga, and comes back to the teacher and says, “This is pretty difficult but I have managed to get rid of at least some desires.” The teacher says to him, “But you are still desiring to get rid of desire. What about that?” Then the student sees that if he strives to stop desiring to get rid of desire, then he has got to stop desiring to get rid of not desiring to desire. Suddenly he finds himself once more in a vicious circle. He realizes there is nothing he can do about it and nothing he cannot do about it.

This predicament in Zen is called a mosquito trying to bite an iron bull, a situation of such psychic extremity that nothing can be done about it. What does this situation mean? When you find yourself in that kind of trap, what is the meaning of the trap? It is very simple. When there is nothing you can do about a given situation, and even doing nothing is doing something, that means that the ego, as something separate from the rest of the world, does not exist. Of course it cannot do anything, and equally it cannot not do something. It is completely phony. The fiction of there being a separate ego—either to force its actions on the world or to have the actions of the world forced on it—has been exposed.

The ego does not exist except as a figment of the imagination, or as a player in the game of pretending that everybody is responsible, independent, and separate. That is a great game, but it is only a game. The whole object of the Zen dialogue between the teacher and the student is to carry the foolish game of being a separate ego to its logical conclusion, to its reductio ad absurdum, so that, finally, as Blake said, “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.”