TRANSCENDING DUALITY

CHAPTER SIX

I want to begin this subject with a discussion of male-female symbolism in Tantric yoga, and then move on to other aspects of the Mahayana.

You will find that in the Tantric art forms, every buddha or aspect of buddha has a feminine counterpart. Not only do they have feminine counterparts, but they also have different forms depending on the level at which they are being manifested. For instance, there are the five dhyani buddhas, who represent the blossom of a rose; one in the middle and the remaining four surrounding it. Each has a corresponding bodhisattva form, and each bodhisattva has, in turn, a corresponding heruka form, which is a rough, weird, and kind of far-out character, often depicted as having a bull’s head. But all of these are forms of the original five buddhas. Whether they are in the form of a bodhisattva or a heruka, they are all reducible to the original group of dhyani buddhas.

Now, all of these figures have female counterparts, and these male/female pairs are always represented as touching at all points, in the complete embrace of sexual intercourse. It is understood that this embrace will last forever and ever, and will never end, and that this idea or image is a way of representing the resonant nature of life. The fundamental point of Tantric yoga is self-knowledge. Without resonance nothing happens. Suppose we had a room in which all the walls, and the floor, and the ceiling were soundproofed. You would hardly be able to hear anyone talk, because the voice benefits from resonance. Resonance is why people enjoy singing in the bathtub. It resonates with their voice, and they suddenly discover that they have a good voice. That is why violins, cellos, or bass fiddles have hollow wooden bodies: to make their sounds resonate, to play them back to themselves.

Perhaps this is the reason we are all so fascinated with taking photographs, writing things down, and, above all, remembering. These are all forms of resonance. A person who had total amnesia, who did not remember anything, would not be capable of self-knowledge. And perhaps there are some forms of life that do not know they are there. I do not know whether the particular cells constituting my body know that they exist. Maybe they do. Maybe they have some wonderful system of resonance that I know nothing about and they are all worried about what I am going to do with them, and are having conferences and meetings and making policy decisions and so on about this person in charge. It might well be that when we die our cells suddenly say, “God is dead.” They have a theological controversy and say, “We will just have to fend for ourselves from now on.” It may be that we have some kind of system like that, but certainly to know that, I don’t know. In any case, to know you exist you need an echo.

So I invented the following limerick:

There was a young man who said, “Though

It seems that I know that I know.

What I would like to see

Is the I that knows me

When I know that I know that I know.”

We are absolutely fascinated with the whole idea of remembering and recording. When there is a gathering of people, they say, “This is great. It’s a pity somebody didn’t bring a camera.” But in recording a thing there is both a gain and a loss. That’s why some people say things should be photographed, while others prefer to look at them and then let them go. I had some experience of this phenomenon while touring in Japan. My students brought cameras and were constantly photographing things, and I had a camera as well and was also constantly photographing, but at the same time I felt that so long as I had a camera with me I would be distracted from actuality by it. I had a little box with which I went around grabbing life. Of course, it was great to come back and look at the photographs, but there is something about a photograph that is inferior to the actual experience that is being photographed. There is something immensely fascinating about photography and painting. They are forms of reproduction, which is also true of sexuality. They are like sexual reproduction in that they say you are here, you are alive, and they resonate with life. One school of religion says, “Let it all go. Don’t be attached. Live in the moment.” Krishnamurti used to say, “Stop trying to remember everything.”

You may need a kind of factual memory for your name and address and telephone number and things like that, but do not linger over memories, treasuring them, thinking, “I’m going to keep my girlfriend’s lock of hair and take it out every now and then and look at it and it will make me feel wonderful.” That is a clinging to memory, which holds you to the past and to death.

The other school of thought, quite opposite to this, goes along with the title of one of Henry Miller’s books, Remember to Remember. This school says, “Hold on to it all. Get involved. Keep your girlfriend’s hair; keep all the photographs.” You know how in some houses the piano is completely covered with photographs and reminiscences. I went to visit Gloria Swanson once, and had never before seen such a house full of memories. Everything in all directions was of Gloria Swanson, photographed on this occasion, signed on that occasion, and receiving various presentations. I also once went to visit the wife of a former archbishop of Canterbury, and the whole house was memorials, a complete clutter of tombstone furniture with little brass plates on it, “Presented on the occasion” of this, that, and the other. Now, you might say, “That person isn’t really living. They are stuck in the past.” But on the other hand, what is life without memory, resonance, echo?

I scarcely need to point out the duality of all this. If you are a wise man you do not take sides in this issue, you occupy both sides. That is the meaning of the unity of samsara and nirvana. On the one hand, you let go of everything and live in the eternal now because that is all there is. Memory is an illusion; it is all gone. Everything that has made an impression on you is gone. That is the meaning of maya, or illusion. There is only the eternal now, the present moment, and there never will be anything else. All remembering occurs in the present; memory exists in the eternal now.

On the other hand, what fun to drag life out and make it echo and get involved with it, and to fall in love and become attached.

R. H. Blyth once wrote me a letter in which he said, “What are you doing these days? As for me, I am abandoning all kinds of satori and enlightenment and am trying to become as deeply attached to as many people and as many things as possible.”

It is a balancing trick, like riding a bicycle. You find yourself falling over one way and you turn in that direction and stay up. In the same way, when you find yourself becoming too attached to life, you correct that excessive attachment with the realization that nothing exists except the eternal now. And then, when you feel you are safe again, because the eternal now is the only thing that exists, you go off and get involved with some kind of social, political, amorous, familial, scholarly, or artistic enterprise. The two always go together.

This is the meaning of the sexual symbolism in Tantric yoga. The male knows he exists only if there is a female, an echo. And the female knows of her existence only when there is a male. Nobody ever came into existence without parents. There is simply no other way into this universe.

I want to illustrate this idea of simultaneous attachment and detachment, involution and evolution. Involution is how you get involved; evolution is how you get out. Tantric yoga represents all of this in the most extraordinary symbolism based not only on the sexual functioning of the human body but also on the whole nervous system as well. In yoga philosophy there is the idea of the psychic anatomy, and this psychic anatomy belongs to the subtle body. Do not expect to find this subtle body in the physical organism. It is not an addition to the physical organism or a kind of ghost that goes around with it. The physical body is the body as seen by others. The subtle body is the way you feel yourself to be.

The anatomy of the subtle body consists of the processes of involution and evolution. These processes are visualized as a spinal tree with two paths crossing back and forth in front of it. The familiar image of two serpents on a rod, the caduceus carried by Mercury, is another representation of this same idea. Alchemically, mercury—the mirror substance—is the void, the pure clear light. It is the same thing as the Buddhist diamond. The tree or canal of the subtle body is called the sushuna. One of the two routes crossing in front of it is called the ida. The other is the pingala. In one channel something is going down, and on the other something is coming up. At the base of the spinal column, according to the chakra system of Tantric yoga, sits the kundalini, the serpent power. The symbol of the serpent power is an inverted triangle with a phallus, upright and erect, with a sleeping serpent coiled all the way around it. That is involution: to be absolutely involved. The sex symbol is used because, symbolically, sex stands for complete involvement.

Once you have experienced complete involvement, the trick is to get out. The process of yoga is represented as awakening the serpent that is sleeping the sleep of maya. Captivated by illusion, it thinks that the world really exists. To put it another way, the male has been captivated by the female echo of himself, and the female has been captivated by the male echo of herself. To say it a third way, you have been caught by memory; you think the objects of memory are all really here. You do not realize that there is only an eternal now. In other words, you are involved. You have become one-sided in the direction of involvement. Now, if you go out to any one end of the spectrum, you will forget you are there. You will enter a kind of nonexistence. You cannot really nonexist because you will always come back eventually, but if you go too far to one extreme, you will not know you are here. Therefore you must evolve. The process of evolving is symbolized by the idea that you can draw the involved energy located in the kundalini, which is the sex center, and send it back up the spinal tree to the top, from whence it came.

The practice of sexual yoga employs a male and a female partner who are husband and wife or are in some kind of spiritual marriage. The male sits in the normal meditation posture. The female sits on top of him, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. He holds her around her waist. In this position they arouse the sexual force. The theory is that instead of dissipating this energy in the ordinary way—through orgasm—they send it up the spinal tree, back into the brain. Do not take this literally. It is symbolism. To take this symbolism literally would be to turn it into a superstition. It would be exactly the kind of superstition that comes from thinking that heaven is somewhere up in the sky and there really are streets of gold and angels wandering around in nighties, playing harps. All of these images are ways of talking about our inner anatomy, our psychic anatomy. The kingdom of heaven is within you. When Jesus ascended into heaven, he went right into the middle of himself and disappeared.

The image of the pearly gates of heaven makes people think that the gates of heaven are literally gates covered with pearls. In fact, the image means nothing of the kind. It is actually meant to convey the idea that the gates of heaven are like pearls, with all the connotations associated with a pearl’s spherical shape and luster. It is because of these same connotations that, in Hinduism, the idea of many incarnations is likened to beads strung together on a thread. The thread is called the sutra atman. Sutra is “thread”; atman is “self.” The sutra atman is the thread of self on which all the beads of reincarnation hang. The self is so thin, though, that it is like no-self. Which brings us back to the idea of raising the kundalini—the snake, or serpent power—up the tree. To raise the serpent you have to let go of the hang-ups of involvement and realize that there are no possessions, everything is falling away, and all memories are just a holding-on-to of illusions. When you evolve to the point of thoroughly understanding that, then you can become involved again.

In this Tantric symbolism you have a marvelous picture of the world alternating between systole and diastole, attachment and detachment. This takes us right back to the idea of the bodhisattva who is liberated, who has let go and is no longer attached, and has given up memory. The meaning behind the idea of giving up the man or woman who is your resonator is that, when you give them up, you will find that you are free: there is only the eternal now.

Of course, the bodhisattva, instead of staying detached, goes back into the world. There are all sorts of funny symbolic stories about bodhisattvas appearing in the world as beggars and whores, using every conceivable kind of device in order to liberate other beings.

This idea of systole/diastole, attachment/detachment, takes us all the way back to the original Hindu image of the world as the pralaya and the manavantara. The manavantara is the period in which Brahma manifests himself as multiple beings for 4,320,000 years. The pralaya is the period in which he withdraws and everything disappears. This alternation between pralaya and manavantara goes on forever and ever, and not only in our universe, but also in many other dimensions of space and time. The Buddhist idea of giving up attachment to the world and yet remaining in it is the same idea of the manavantara/pralaya alternation re-created in another form.

You may feel that this cycle is pretty monotonous, and, in fact, monotony is one of the basic feelings underlying Buddhism. “Must we go around again? Enough of this. Let’s go to sleep. Time must have a stop.” But when you stop you forget that it all ever happened, and this forgetfulness is marvelous, because then the world can start over again without your knowing that it has all happened before, and you are never bored. This is the cure for being tired of things. There are going to be all sorts of problems, but you won’t know you’ve had any problems before, so having problems again will not bore you until you accumulate memories once more. When you have had enough of these problems that it becomes a bore dealing with them, you get rid of yourself again. It is called death, a beautiful arrangement for keeping everything young and new and for keeping the universe running without getting tired of itself.

These are the two fundamental notions of being, and they are represented by the dualities of male and female, light and dark, now and memory. Memory, remember, creates the future as well as the past. You would not know you were going to have anything happen tomorrow unless you remembered that something had happened yesterday. You figure that because the sun rose yesterday, and the day before yesterday, it will rise again tomorrow. If you did not remember the past, you would not know that there will be a tomorrow. Because there is no tomorrow. Tomorrow is an illusion produced by memory, and so is yesterday. They simply do not exist. Where is tomorrow? Bring me tomorrow’s newspaper.

You may feel, as you think these things over, that you are almost on the verge of going mad. I sometimes feel that way when I get involved in a contemplative state. The thing to do is not to worry. Let go and swing with it, because you will always bounce back. What gives you the sense of impending madness is that you think you are not in control and that someone or something else has taken over. Well, of course something has to take over. When you have driven long enough in the car, you say to your wife, “Will you drive for a while, please?” You want the relief that comes when something else takes over for you. But that “something else” is always secretly you, and you need not fear it. The nature of being is constructed in this extraordinarily fascinating way. It constantly renews itself by eternally forgetting itself. This is a perfectly marvelous arrangement. It is a funny thing how we all alternate in this way between remembering and not remembering. We remember things long enough to know that we are here. We would not know it if we didn’t remember. But when memory weighs on us too much and we are too much here, we seek liberation in the realization that all memory is an illusion, there is no future and equally no past, there is nothing except the present moment. But when you are liberated, you like to come back and play the memory game again. Liberation is a cleaning process. You wipe off the blackboard and start writing again, then you wipe it off, and then you start writing again. This is the process whereby life keeps going.

I have been listening to recorded sutra chanting from Koya-san, Mount Koya, which is the ultimate center and inner sanctuary of the Japanese practice of the Vajrayana branch of Mahayana Buddhism. The monks who were chanting are a bunch of boys just like American college boys who play football, and some of them do not have the faintest idea what they are doing. Some of them are there only because their fathers have sent them there. Perhaps their fathers own temples and they have to carry on their fathers’ tradition, because the family business must go on, and so some of them have no idea what this chanting is all about. You and I could get into the swing of it, dance to it, go very far out on it, as it was originally intended for us to do. But for many of the monks of Mount Koya, these chants are just a chore, a thing they have to get up at five o’clock in the morning to do. They have to memorize all this, get it exactly right, and they do, but they have completely forgotten why they do it and the substance underlying it.

The monks on Mount Koya have come to a point in the historical development of their way of life where they often remember so much about it that nothing in their way of life is any longer new to them. They are just going through the motions. This is a version of the same paradox I mentioned earlier, that the echo of memory that tells you that you exist also entraps you. To the extent that it tells you that you do exist, it is an advantage. To the extent that it traps you, it is the price you must pay for your existence, and you should be thankful. Somebody gave it to you.

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the Lord God gave it to you, and you are supposed to be thankful and say, “Anything bad that I did was from me. Dear God, anything good that I did was from you.” What a marvelous mix-up that is, and there must come a point in all this where you have to say to people, “Please come off it.”

I was aching to know enough Japanese to say to those boys on Mount Koya, “Realize what a great thing you have here! Enjoy it! Get together and join hands and chant these sutras and really make something happen.”

Now, in talking about alternating between memory and forgetfulness I have been talking about the process I call flip-flop-ability, whereby we switch from one attitude to another, one situation to another. This pulse or switching is the very nature of existence, the beat of your heart, the vibration of sounds and light. Everything goes back and forth so that you can know you are here. This game of knowing has its own inner meaning. To complete my discussion of it I want to talk about one form of the Mahayana that I have not discussed at all. This is the Pure Land school, which is the most popular form of Mahayana Buddhism in the Far East. Everywhere in China and Japan the multitudes follow this branch, which venerates as its presiding image Amitabha, one of the dhyani buddhas, whose name means “boundless light.” He is an aspect of Mahavairochana, the great sun Buddha, who was probably derived, historically, from Ahura Mazda from Persia, the great sun god of the Mazdians and the Parsees. But although Ahura Mazda may have been the origin of the sun Buddha, the idea of the Persian sun god has been greatly transformed by Buddhism.

You have all probably seen photographs of the Daibutsu, the Great Buddha, at Kamakura, Japan. It is an enormous bronze figure that sits in a beautiful park surrounded by pine trees. The original temple around it was long ago demolished by a tidal wave, for which thanks be to God. If it hadn’t been for that tidal wave, nobody would have ever really seen this figure. This huge bronze Buddha is about forty-two feet high. It sits surrounded by great activity. School children by the thousands are always streaming by on tours; photographers are always taking pictures; people are constantly selling various souvenirs; exhibitions of dwarf trees are going on all around, and amid all this, there Buddha sits, looking down forever. He hushes everything. No matter how much turmoil there is in the park, the huge face of this Buddha presides over everything, and you cannot ignore it. He subdues you into peace, but not in an authoritative way. He does not say, “Shut up!” but is just so peaceful that you cannot help but catch the infusion of peace that flows from him. This is the Buddha Amida, or Amitabha. He is not the historical Shakyamuni Gautama Buddha, who lived in India, but is one of the dhyani buddhas who are not manifested in the world.

The religion connected with this figure is called the Pure Land school; in Japanese it is Jodo-shin-shu, the True Sect of the Pure Land. This religion has its origins, as always, in India, but under the genius of Honen and Shinran, who were medieval Buddhist saints, the Japanese developed their own special variety of it.

It is a very strange religion. It takes as its basis the idea that we are now living in the most decadent period of history. This claim comes from the Hindu idea that this is the Kali yuga, the end of time, when everything is completely fouled up. This period started on February 23, 3023 B.C. It will last for five thousand years more, at which point everything will fall apart and the universe will disappear out of sheer failure. In this decadent period nobody can be truly virtuous. People who try to be virtuous at this time are merely showing off, are not really pure, are just pretending to be virtuous. They give money to charity not because they love the people they are giving the money to but because they feel they ought to do it. Their motivations are inescapably bad, and because of that, nobody can possibly liberate themselves from the chains of karma. The more they try to get out of their karma, their conditioning, their bondage to their past, the more they get themselves involved in it. Therefore all human beings living now—in the Kali yuga, the end time, which the Japanese call mappo—are just hopelessly selfish.

In this predicament you cannot rely on jiriki, your own power, to achieve liberation from self. You have to rely on the power of tariki, which is the power of something other than you. In the Jodo-shin-shu sect, the tariki, the other power, is represented in the form of Amitabha—in Japanese, Amida—this great beneficent Buddha figure in the park at Kamakura whom everybody loves. He is quite strangely different from any kind of authoritarian god figure we have in the West. He sits there serenely quiet. He does not preach. All you have to do is say his name in homage—“Namu Amida Butsu,” which means “the name of Amida Buddha”—and after death you will be reborn in a special paradise called Sukhavati, which is jodo, the pure land, where becoming enlightened is easy. It has none of the difficulties surrounding it that we have in our ordinary life today.

Everybody born in the pure land is born inside a lotus. There is a huge lotus pond there. Amida sits in front of it with all his attendants, and the lotuses come up out of the pond and go pop as a bud breaks open, and inside every bud is a new little being, somebody who has said the Namu Amida Butsu formula on earth and is now sitting on a lotus like a buddha. In the museum at Mount Koya there is a great painting depicting what it is like to arrive in this pure land. It shows a huge panorama of Amitabha and all his attendants—such as the apsaras, who look at you with lovely, longing eyes—and all you have to do to get there is say “Namu Amida Butsu.” Just say it. You don’t even have to believe that it will work.

That is the religion of most Japanese Buddhists, believe it or not. If you really feel that you will go to Sukhavati for having said “Namu Amida Butsu,” then you will be grateful and try to help other people while you are here, and be a bodhisattva. The whole point, though, is that you cannot do this by your own effort, and the moment you think you can, you become a phony. You must go completely the other way. You must acknowledge that you have no power or capability of being virtuous or unselfish.

This kind of religion developed a peculiar kind of saint they call the myoko-nin: myo meaning “wonderful”; ko meaning “fine”; nin meaning “person.” Myoko-nin are very special characters.

Among stories told about them is one of a traveling man who came to a temple during the course of a night. He walked in, took the sacred cushions on which the priests sit, arranged them in front of the altar, and went to sleep. In the morning the priest came in and said, “What’s going on here?” The myoko-nin looked at him and answered, “You must be a stranger here. You don’t belong to the family.”

The myoko-nin knew that the great thing in life comes not from one’s own doing but from the side of experience that we think belongs to the other. There are some who believe that it comes from the split in experience that you call yourself. Those are the jiriki people. The tariki people believe it comes from the other.

When you penetrate deeply into the doctrines of the Pure Land school you will see that only the simple people believe that Amitabha Buddha is really sitting on a golden lotus surrounded by all those apsaras and so on. The simple priests in the country villages still insist that that is what one should believe, but the sophisticated priests do not believe that at all. They know that Amitabha is in you. It is that side of you that you do not define as being part of you.

It is in the nature of duality that self and other go together. You do not need to cling to yourself and oppose the other. Everything you call the other is you too. You will realize this if you take any aspect of duality to an extreme. You can, for instance, pursue the idea of total courage, of letting go of everything, of being a true Zen monk, abandoning all property, living in a barn, sitting up in the middle of the night, in the cold, eating rice and pickles, and so on. You can seek liberation in that manner, by going to that extreme. But if you do, you will eventually arrive at the same place as the person who pursued liberation by going to the other extreme, of making no effort whatsoever.

Liberation comes of itself. The person who seeks to make no effort will encounter as many difficulties as the person who seeks to pursue the path of total courage, because how can one make no effort? How does one get to the point of doing no work at all, of just doing nothing, however? Even if all you do is say “Namu Amida Butsu,” you are still doing work. It is easy to do, but it’s still work. To really do nothing, with perfection, is as difficult as doing everything.