Become What you Are
by Allan Watts
Zen
ALTHOUGH ZEN IS A WORD OF ONLY THREE LETTERS, three volumes would not explain it, nor even three libraries of volumes. If one were to compile books on the subject to the end of time, they would not explain it, for all that could be written would only be ideas about Zen, not Zen itself. Indeed, whoever imagines he has explained Zen has in fact only explained it away; it can no more be bound by a definition than the wind can be shut in a box without ceasing to be wind. Thus any attempt to write on Zen may seem an absurdity from the beginning, but that is only so if either reader or writer imagines that Zen can be contained in a set of ideas. A book about London is in no sense London itself, and no sane person would dream of thinking that it is. Yet apparently intelligent people often make the equally ridiculous mistake of identifying a philosophical system, a dogma, a creed, with Ultimate Truth, imagining that they have found that Truth embraced in a set of propositions which appeals to their reason. There are thousands of men and women searching through volume after volume, visiting religious societies, and attending the lectures of famous teachers in the vain hope that they will one day come upon some explanation of the mysteries of life: some saying, some idea, which will contain the solution to the Infinite Riddle. Some continue the search till they die, others imagine that in various ideologies they have found what they desire, and a few penetrate beyond ideas about Truth to Truth itself. There are some religions and philosophies which lend themselves more easily than others to the error of mistaking the idea for the reality, religions in which the creed and the symbol are emphasized at the expense of the spiritual experience which they are intended to embody. This, however, is less a reflection on those religions than on the ignorance of their devotees. But there is at least one cult in which this error is almost impossible, precisely because it has no creed, no philosophical system, no canon of scriptures, no intellectually comprehensible doctrine. So far as it can be called a definite cult at all, it consists of devices for freeing the soul from its fetters, devices which are picturesquely described as fingers pointing at the moon—and he is a fool who mistakes the finger for the moon. This cult is Zen, a form of Buddhism that developed in China and now flourishes principally in Japan. Zen is itself a Japanese word, derived from the Chinese Ch'an or Ch'an-na, a form of the Sanskrit dhyana, which is usually rendered in English as "meditation" or "contemplation." This, however, is a misleading translation, for although in the terminology of yoga dhyana signifies a certain state of contemplation, a state of what we should somewhat inaccurately call "trance," Zen is a far more inclusive term. We come nearer to its meaning if we remember that the word dhyana is related to gñana (the Greek gnosis) or Knowledge in the very highest sense of that word, which is to say supreme spiritual enlightenment. Gñana (another form of which is sometimes spelled dzyan) is very close to Zen, the more so when we remember that Zen is said to have come into the world at the moment when Gautama the Buddha found Enlightenment when sitting one night under the famous Bodhi Tree at Bodh-gaya in northern India. There, according to the teachers of Zen, he found something which cannot be expressed in any form of words; an experience which every man must undergo for himself; which can no more be passed on from one man to another than you can eat another person's food for him.
Zen, however, as a specific cult, is mainly a product of the Chinese mind. Buddhism developed in India as a highly subtle and abstract system of philosophy, a cult of sublime other-worldliness perfectly suited to the inhabitants of a hot climate where life is able to flourish with little labour. The Chinese and Japanese, on the other hand, have a climate nearer to our own and have the same practical bent as the peoples of northern Europe. Perhaps the greatest triumph of Buddhism is that it was able to adapt itself to a mentality so far removed from the Indian. Thus Zen has been described as the Chinese revolt against Buddhism. It would be nearer the truth to call it the Chinese interpretation of Buddhism, although the term "revolt" certainly conveys the fierce, almost iconoclastic character of Zen—a cult which has no patience with any practice or formula which has not immediate relationship with the one thing of importance: Enlightenment. To understand this revolt or interpretation (or better, "revolutionary interpretation") some of the fundamental principles of Buddhism must be borne in mind.
The Buddha, who lived some 600 years BCE, taught that life, as we live it, is necessarily unharmonious because of the selfish, possessive attitude we adopt towards it. In Sanskrit this attitude is called trishna (often mistranslated "desire"), and though there is no one word for it in English, it may be understood as the craving to resist change, to "save our own skins" at all costs, to possess those whom we love; in fact, to hold on to life "like grim death." And that particular phrase has its moral. If anything that lives and moves is held, it dies just like a plucked flower. Egotism is a fierce holding on to oneself; it is building oneself up in a haughty stronghold, refusing to join in the play of life, refusing to accept the eternal laws of change of movement to which all are subject. But that refusal can only be illusion. Whether we like it or not, change comes, and the greater the resistance, the greater the pain. Buddhism perceives the beauty of change, for life is like music in this: if any note or phrase is held for longer than its appointed time, the melody is lost. Thus Buddhism may be summed up in two phrases: "Let go!" and "Walk on!" Drop the craving for self, for permanence, for particular circumstances, and go straight ahead with the movement of life. The state of mind thereby attained is called Nirvana. But this is a teaching easy to misunderstand, for it is so easy to represent the doctrine of "letting go" as an utter denial of life and the world, and Nirvana as a state infinitely removed from all earthly concerns.
Zen, however, corrected this error in the most surprising and unique manner—so much so that a great part of the Zen teachings may appear at first to be mere buffoonery or nonsense.
A disciple came to Zen Master Chao-chou and asked, "I have just come to this monastery. Would you mind giving me some instruction, please?"
The master replied, "Have you eaten your breakfast yet, or not?"
"Yes, I have, sir."
"Then wash your dishes."
It is said that as a result of this remark the disciple was suddenly enlightened as to the whole meaning of Zen.
On another occasion a master was about to address an assembly of students when a bird began to sing in a nearby tree. The master remained silent until the bird had finished, and then, announcing that his address had been given, went away.
Another master set a pitcher before two of his disciples. "Do not call it a pitcher," he said, "but tell me what it is." One replied, "It cannot be called a piece of wood." The master, however, was not satisfied with this answer, and he turned to the other disciple who simply knocked the pitcher over and walked away.
This action had the master's full approval. It will be asked whether these antics have the least connection with religion, even with ordinary sanity. They are regarded by the exponents of Zen as full of the deepest significance, and when we remember that Zen has been, beyond question, one of the most powerful influences in shaping the art and culture of the Far East, such behavior is entitled to respect. Has it some symbolic meaning? What is it about? The answer is that it has no symbolic meaning, and that it is about nothing. But it is something, and that something is that very obvious but much ignored thing--life. The Zen master is in fact demonstrating life in its actuality; without words or ideas he is teaching his disciples to know life directly. Sometimes in answer to a religious question he will give a smack on the face, returning a reality for an abstraction. If he gave a reasoned answer, the disciple would be able to analyze it, to subject it to intellectual dissection, and to imagine a mere lifeless formula as a living truth. But with a smack, a bird, a pitcher, a heap of dishes there can be no mistake. A smack is here one moment and gone the next. There is nothing you can catch hold of, nothing other than a most lively fact, as much alive as the passing moment which can never be made to stay. And a bird is a bird; you hear its song, but you cannot seize the notes to make them continue.
It just is, and is gone, and you feel the beauty of its song precisely because the notes do not wait for you to analyze them. Therefore the Zen master is not trying to give you ideas about life; he is trying to give you life itself, to make you realize life in and around you, to make you live it instead of being a mere spectator, a mere pedant absorbed in the dry bones of something which the life has long deserted. A symphony is not explained by a mathematical analysis of its notes; the mystery of a woman's beauty is not revealed by a postmortem dissection; and no one ever understood the wonder of a bird on the wing by stuffing it and putting it in a glass case. To understand these things, you must live and move with them as they are alive. The same is true of the universe: no amount of intellectual analysis will explain it, for philosophy and science can only reveal its mechanism, never its meaning or, as the Chinese say, its Tao.
"What is the Tao?" A Zen master answers, "Usual life is the very Tao."
"How does one bring oneself into accord with it?" "If you try to accord with it, you will get away from it."
For to imagine that there is a "you" separate from life which somehow has to accord with life is to fall straight into the trap. If you try to find the Tao, you are at once presupposing a difference befiveen yourself and the Tao. Therefore the Zen masters say nothing about the means for becoming Enlightened, for understanding the Tao. They simply concentrate on Tao itself. When you are reading a book you defeat your purpose altogether if you think about yourself trying to concentrate on it; instead of thinking about what is written, your attention is absorbed in your efforts to concentrate. The secret is to think of the book and forget yourself. But that is not all. The book is of little use to you if you go to the other extreme and simply let it "run away with you." On the contrary, you must bring your own understanding and intelligence to it, and then through the union of your own thoughts and the thoughts in the book, something new is born. This union is the important task; you must just do it, and not waste energy in thinking about doing it. The same is true in Zen. It does not ask that we should so submit ourselves to life that the world altogether masters us and blots us out. There are some who never live, who are always having thoughts about life and feelings about life; others are swept away on the tides of circumstance, so overwhelmed by events that they have nothing of their own.
Buddhism, however, is the Middle Way, and this is not a compromise but a union between opposites to produce a "higher third"; just as man and woman unite to produce a child. The same process is found in almost every religion, in some deeply hidden, in others plainly revealed. In Christianity man must be born anew of water and the spirit, symbols of substance and energy, concrete life and the mind of man. Thus the prayer to Christ to be "born in us" is the hope for the same Enlightenment that we find in Buddhism and the story of Christ's birth is its allegory. For the Holy Ghost is spirit, and Mary (from the Latin word mare—sea, water) is the world, called in Sanskrit maya. And the mother of the Buddha was also called Maya, and he too was supposed to have been miraculously conceived. Thus the realization of the Christ within, the Buddha within, the Tao within, or the Krishna within is in each instance the result of a process which Zen presents to us in this unique and almost startling manner. It is the understanding of the One which lies behind the Many; the bringing together of opposites, of subject and object, the ego and the universe, to create the Holy Child.
And yet we must beware of that definition, of that convenient summary of religious endeavor. It so easily becomes a mere catchphrase, a truth so fastened in a nutshell that it ceases to be of the least use. In its prison it withers away and dies. Therefore Zen comes at this stage with a most inconvenient question, "When the Many are reduced to the One, to what is the One to be reduced?" Only he who knows what that is understands Zen. It would be futile to try to explain any further, for to do so would be to defeat the very purpose of Zen, which is to make everyone find out for himself. It is like a detective story with the last chapter missing; it remains a mystery, a thing like a beam of light which can be seen and used, but never caught—loved, but never possessed. And by that we may know that Zen is life.
The Parable of the Cow's Tail
A FAMOUS ZEN KOAN ASKS:
When a cow goes out of its enclosure to the edge of the abyss, its horns and head and its hoofs all pass through, but why can't the tail also pass?"
Commenting on this, an old master says:
If the cow runs it will fall into the trench; If it returns it will be butchered.
That little tail is a very strange thing.
In the quest for understanding of life there comes a time when everyone is confronted with "that little tail"—the one tiny obstacle that stands in the way of complete fulfillment. We know that it is only a fraction of a hairsbreadth in thickness, and yet we feel it as a million miles wide. There is in mathematics an equation which, when drawn as a graph, appears as a curve that always nears but never touches a given line. At first the curve sweeps boldly towards that line, and the head, horns, and hoofs go clean through the gate, but, just as the tail is about to pass, the curve straightens, leaving just a fraction of an inch between itself and the line. As it moves on, that fraction grows less and less, but still curve and line do not touch, and even though it be continued for a thousand miles or a thousand million miles the gap remains, though at each successive point it becomes smaller. This curve represents the progress of human intellect towards Enlightenment, grasping more and more subtle nuances of meaning at each stage of its journey. It is as if we stood bound to illusion by a hair; to weaken it we split it with the knife of intellect, and split it again until its divisions become so fine that to make its cuts the mind must be sharpened indefinitely. Yet however much we split this hair, the sum total of its divisions is not a whit thinner than the original hair, for the more fragile we make our bonds, the more is their number.
Philosophically this condition is known as infinite regression, and psychologically it is that mad, exasperating state that must always precede the final experience of awakening. We can demonstrate this by the famous triangle puzzle of Mahayana philosophy. The two base points of this triangle represent the pairs of opposites which confront us at every moment of our experience—subject and object, I and you, positive and negative, something and nothing. The apex represents the relation, the meaning between them, the principle that gives them reality, the One as distinct from the Many. But the moment we set this One apart from the Many we create yet another pair of opposites, thus initiating a process which will continue indefinitely with ever-increasing complications. In the Bhagavad Gita we are told to stand aside from our thoughts and feelings, to realize that they are not the Self and learn that the Self is not the actor in actions but the Spectator of actions. But why not stand aside yet again from this first standing aside and perceive that it is not the Self that stands aside, for the Self performs no action? This, too, may continue forever.
The first step in Buddhism is Right Motive, and to attain Enlightenment it is said that we must do away with selfish desire. But if we have selfish desire in the beginning, surely the desire to get rid of it is also selfish. We desire to be rid of our selfishness for a selfish reason, and again we may easily have a selfish reason for getting rid of the selfish reason for wanting to be selfless. An even more fundamental illustration of the problem may be found in the simplest statement of Eastern philosophy, namely, that there is only one Reality and that all diversity is illusion. This is a statement which almost all students of Eastern wisdom take very much for granted: it is the first thing they learn but in fact it is about almost all there is to learn, for the rest is mere embroidery. It is the central principle of Vedanta, Mahayana, and Taoism alike: there are no two principles in the universe; there is only Brahman, Tathata, or Tao, and Enlightenment is just the realization of one's identity with it. But here the complications begin and the cow's tail gets stuck in the gate, for the moment we think, "This is Tao" or "That is Tao" we immediately make a distinction between Tao and this and that. Furthermore, as soon as we think that the object of religion is to identify ourselves with the Tao, we create the dualism of the Tao and ourselves that are to be identified with it. Dualism appears the moment we make an assertion or a denial about anything; as soon as we think that This is That or This is not That we have the distinction between This and That. And even when we say that in Reality there are no distinctions, we have the opposition of Reality and distinctions.
Moreover, let us consider this problem: if there is only Tao, how can there be any divergence from it? If there is only one Reality, our thoughts, enlightened or unenlightened, must be it. There can be no distinction between Reality and illusion if there is only Reality. Whether you can concentrate your thoughts or not, whether they are of compassion or hatred, whether you are thinking about Buddhism or chewing your nails, you cannot by any means diverge from the Tao. You may love life or you may loathe it, yet your loving and loathing are themselves manifestations of life. If you seek union with Reality your very seeking is Reality, and how can you say that you have ever lost union?
To put it in another way: it is said that to be enlightened we must live in the eternal. Now, that infinitely small and therefore infinitely great point of time is called the present moment. The universe exists only in that moment, and it is said that the wise man moves with it, clinging neither to the past nor to the future, making his mind like the mirror that reflects everything instantly as it comes before it, yet making no effort to retain the reflection when the object is removed. "The perfect man," says Chuang-tzu, "employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep."
Yet, when the matter is carefully considered, we find that this is a description, not of what we should do, but of what we cannot help doing in any case. For whether we think of the past or the future, and whatever we think about either of them, our thoughts exist in and partake of the eternal Now; otherwise they would not exist at all. We cannot separate ourselves from this present moment, and if we imagine that Enlightenment consists simply in living in the present, in thinking only about what is going on now, we find ourselves in the dualism of now and then. The point is that we can only think of what is going on now, even if we are thinking of the past or the future. For our thoughts about past and future are going on now, and we are thinking them. There is only one Reality! Therefore it will be asked: "Is Enlightenment simply to live and think like any ignorant fool, not bothering about philosophy, mysticism, or morality, knowing that whatever you do you cannot get out of harmony with the Tao?"
If we answer, "Yes," we assert; if we say, "No," we deny. The tail is still caught in the gate. But if you think that you will attain Enlightenment by living like an ignorant fool, you are still caught in the dualism of the you that must attain enlightenment. Indeed, there is no prescription for enlightenment, for as soon as we start saying that it is this or it is not this, we try to make two realities in the universe instead of one. In fact, you can think about philosophy, or about eating and drinking, you can love mankind, you can hate it, you can do as you like, you can do as you don't like, you can discipline yourself, you can run wild, you can seek wisdom, you can ignore it, but you can't diverge from the Tao, for everything, anything, and nothing is Tao. Is it? Beware of that "is." The sting is in the tail.
The Second Immortal
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A MAN WHO LIVED much as other men live. He had a wife and three children and a shop in the Street of Happy Sparrows where he sold cakes, vegetables, and sweet pickles. He rose at dawn and went to bed at sunset; he ate rice three times a day; he smoked two pipes of tobacco in the hour; he talked of buying and selling with his neighbors; he picked his teeth after eating and had his wife scratch his back in the noonday heat. In spring he watched the young grass peeping out from behind the stones; in the summer he lifted an eye at the lazy clouds; in autumn he followed the leaves that danced in the wind; and in the winter he woke to see the tracks of birds in the snow. And in all seasons, between talking and smoking and selling cakes, he chewed watermelon seeds and amused himself by plaiting straw ropes round his toes.
One day, when he went to burn incense at the Temple of Amiable Dragons, his friend the priest approached him, saying: "You are getting on in years and your eldest son is of an age to take care of your shop. It would not be proper for a man such as you to spend the rest of your days in empty activities, for you will go to the grave as insignificantly as old refuse is flung into the river."
"Such being the lot of man," answered the cakeseller, "how can I complain?"
"So many are mere vegetables." said the priest. "But if you are willing to take the trouble you can find yourself a place among the Immortals."
"And who," asked the cakeseller, "are the Immortals?"
"They are those who do not depend on their own power to keep themselves alive. Man is a small creature whose life is like a snowflake. But the wind blows on forever; the sun and moon eternally maintain their courses and the rivers have flowed since time began. The Immortals are they who learn the secrets of these things; instead of relying on their own resources, they allow themselves to be maintained and directed by that which maintains and directs the wind, the sun, the moon, and the rivers."
"But how can one become an Immortal?"
"You will have to find an Immortal to teach you," said the priest. "I am not wise enough."
"Well," said the cakeseller. "I must find one. But there are so many people in the world, and how can one recognize an Immortal?"
"That should not be difficult," answered the priest. "It is said that their breath is operated by the wind; that the sun gives them the light of the right eye and the moon of the left; that their shouting is assisted by the thunder, their whispering by the murmuring waves and their laughter by the mountain streams. The earth, it is said, maintains their flesh, while their bones and vital juices are supplied by the rocks and the rains. Their thoughts and moods are directed by the coming and going of the seasons and the elements, and having such mighty ones as the movers of all their functions they are said to be free from all the ordinary limitations and more powerful even than the gods."
"Such a strange being," observed the cakeseller, "should be easy to recognize," and immediately he returned home, set his affairs in order, instructing his eldest son in the care of the shop, and the same evening left the city on his journey in search of an Immortal. After many weeks upon the road he came to a hut inhabited by an ancient personage of severe aspect who seemed to him to be at least two hundred years old. His white beard caressed the upper part of his shoes and the top of his head glistened like the elbows of an old coat. Noticing his venerable appearance and also the many volumes of the classics with which he was surrounded, the cakeseller at once approached him and begged for instruction, thinking that surely this must be an Immortal, for he was the most aged person he had ever seen. "It is a long time," said the venerable one, "since my advice was asked upon anything, for this is a dissolute age, and the mastery of life is not understood by those who fail to observe the forty-eight precepts and fail to avoid the ninety-one indiscretions. Sit down, and I will instruct you in the words of the ancient sages." Whereupon he began to read from the classics, and the cakeseller sat and listened until the sun went down. And on the following day he read yet more, and again on the next day and the next and the next, and so on, until the cakeseller almost lost count of time. And he was instructed and made to discipline himself in the eight virtuous deeds, the twenty-nine laudable thoughts, the one hundred and eight ceremonial observances, the forty-two marks of superior character, the thirty-seven acts of filial piety and the four hundred and three propitiations of ill-disposed spirits. And all the while the cakeseller grew in righteousness and high-minded conduct, and was disposed to believing himself well on the way to immortality. But one day he remembered suddenly that he had now been with the venerable scholar for some twenty years; the days of his life were growing shorter and yet he knew nothing of the secrets of the sun, moon, rivers, wind, and the elements. At this he was filled with agitation, and in the night set out upon the road again.
After some weeks of wandering in the mountains he came upon a cave where a strange being sat at the entrance. His limbs were like the trunk of a gnarled pine, his hair like wisps of smoke drifting on the wind and his eyes staring and fiery like those of a snake. Duly impressed, the cakeseller again begged for instruction.
"Immortals," said this person, "have the wind as their breath. and to learn this you must cultivate the art of the Expansive Lungs. But this cannot be learned by such as you who chew melon seeds and smoke two pipes an hour and eat three meals a day. If you would have the wind as your breath, you must eat but one grain of rice in a day and drink one cup of water. You must clear the smoke from your windpipe, and learn to breathe but twice in a day. Only then will your lungs be able to contain the wind."
So the cakeseller sat down at the mouth of the cave, ate but one grain of rice and drank but one cup of water a day. And under the instructions of the sage he was made to lessen and lessen the speed of his breath till he thought his eyes would proceed from their sockets and the drums of his ears disturb all the birds of the forest with their bursting. But for many years he practiced until he did indeed breathe but twice a day, at the end of which he saw that his body was as a skeleton hung with skin as spiderwebs cover the branches of a bush, and with a display of exceedingly ill-regulated conduct he fled from the cave.
For many more months he searched for an instruction and finding none began to wonder whether he had perhaps not persevered enough with his teacher. So he began to make his way back to the mountains. On the way he caught up with an itinerant trader who carried a pole over his shoulder to which was attached a bundle containing an assortment of pots, beads, combs, dolls, kitchen utensils, writing materials, seeds, scissors, and sticks of incense. For a while they kept each other company, conversing on idle matters such as the state of the crops, the best ways of driving out fleas, the pleasures of soft rainfall and the various kinds of charcoal useful for making fires. At length the cakeseller told the trader of his desire to find an Immortal who could instruct him and asked whether he knew of any such person. "Have a melon seed," said the trader, offering him a handful. "Indeed, I regret I cannot eat melon seeds," cried the cakeseller, "for if I chew them it will take away my power of Expansive Lungs." The trader shrugged his shoulders, and for a while they walked on in silence, broken only by the cracking of melon seeds between the trader's teeth - a sound which filled the cakeseller with a variety of emotions. On the one hand he began to feel an urge to break his discipline, and once more feel that eminently satisfying crack of seeds between the teeth; on the other he felt he should persist in his search and again ask the trader about the Immortals. Perhaps, he thought, the trader had never heard of Immortals, but it might be that he would recognize such beings if he knew what they were like. I was wondering," said the cakeseller, "whether in your journeyings you have happened to meet with anyone of strange and powerful aspect, whose breath is operated by the wind, whose right and left eyes are given light by the sun and moon respectively, whose shouting is assisted by the thunder, whispering by the murmuring waves and laughter by the mountain streams; whose flesh is maintained by the earth, whose bones and vital juices are supplied by the rocks and the rains, and whose thoughts and moods are directed by the coming and going of the seasons and the elements."
"Oh yes," answered the trader, "I have seen many such beings. Why, I believe that two of them are making their way along this road."
"What!" cried the cakeseller. "On this very road? Let us hurry so that we can catch up with them!" And so they increased pace, and when night fell they did not pause to rest, for the cakeseller persuaded the trader that it would be well to gain upon them by a night's journey. At sunrise they found themselves on the top of a hill from which they could see the road ahead for many miles, but as they looked down upon it there was no one anywhere to be seen.
"It may be," said the cakeseller, "that we overtook them during the night."
Whereat they looked behind and again a view of many miles showed them an empty road. At this the cakeseller was very sad.
"They must have taken a side-track into the mountains," he said, "for it seems that we are the only people on this road."
"Oh," said the trader, "I forgot to tell you. When they go about in pairs one of them is always invisible. You are looking for two men traveling together. Let us look again."
Once more the cakeseller gazed up the road and down the road, but saw no other man upon it than his companion, the trader.
"No," sighed the cakeseller, "we have missed them. I see neither two nor one."
"Are you sure?" replied the trader. "I really believe I can see one. Look again."
"No," said the cakeseller, "I see no man on the road at all, excepting yourself."
At this the trader began to laugh, and as he laughed it seemed to the cakeseller that his laughter was like the sound of a mountain stream
"You!" he exclaimed. "Are you an Immortal? But you look like an ordinary man!"
"Indeed," laughed the trader, "I must confess it. You see, I have to go about in disguise, for otherwise I should be followed all over the place, which would be most inconvenient."
"But your invisible companion, asked the cakeseller, is he also here? Does he look like an Immortal? Describe him to me."
"Surely," answered the trader. "His breathing is operated by the wind but you do not notice it; the light of his right and left eyes is given by the sun and moon, but you do not see it; his shouting is of the thunder, his whispering of the waves, and his laughter of the mountain streams, but you do not hear it; his flesh is maintained by the earth, and his bones and vital juices by the rocks and rains, but you do not understand it; his thoughts and moods are directed by the coming and going of the seasons and the elements, but you are not aware of it. He does not rely on his own resources; he allows himself to be maintained and directed by that which maintains and directs the wind, the sun, the moon, and the rivers, but you do not recognize it."
"Marvelous indeed must he be to look upon!" exclaimed the cakeseller. "Please ask him to become visible so that I can understand his secrets."
"You had better ask yourself," replied the trader. "Only you have the power to make him visible. There is a magic by which you can make him appear."
"Tell me about it." "The magic," answered the trader, "is this: in the spring to watch the young grass peeping out between the stones; in summer to lift an eye at the lazy clouds; in autumn to follow the leaves that dance in the wind; in winter to wake and find the tracks of birds in the snow. To rise at dawn and go to sleep at sunset; to eat rice three times in a day; to talk of buying and selling with one's neighbors; to chew the seeds of water melon and to plait straw ropes around the toes."
And at this the cakeseller discovered the second Immortal.
Tomorrow Never Comes
WHEN WE SAY THAT ALL THINGS IN THE UNIVERSE are the creative activity of God, this is really like putting legs on a snake or painting the reflection on a mirror. It is not to be compared to seeing that activity as it is, although we say that it is God’s activity to draw attention to it in a particular way. But the trouble is that people spend so much energy looking for the God that they fail to see the activity, which is surely a sad state of affairs. What is this activity? The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street. Really we should need to say no more than this, but it is sometimes called the activity of God to point out a certain understanding to the sort of person who might retort, “The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street—so what?
So what? Well, what else are you looking for? Here is someone who eats out the grocer’s store and still complains that he is starving. But the word and concept God, Brahmin, Tao or what you will, was really introduced for such unappreciative stomachs. It is a way of emphasizing actual life to draw attention to it in much the same way as we underline words or put them in italics. Thus we call the universe the activity of God to induce the so-whatever to pay some attention and reverence to it, because he always bolts his life instead of rolling it appreciatively round his tongue. He always thinks of the second and third piece of cake while he is eating the first, and thus is never satisfied with any of them, and ends up with a thoroughly disordered digestion. This is called the vicious circle of having lunch for breakfast, or living for your future. But tomorrow never comes.
The snow is falling on the windowsill. Is this the activity of God? Maybe. But if anyone watches it in order to see God he will surely be disappointed. “No man hath seen God.” No, and in looking for God he may fail to see the snow. “Thou art Brahman!” But if you look in yourself in order to find Brahman, you will be very disappointed indeed. Yet all this trouble has started because people have taken a simple device much too far. The idea of God is a finger pointing the way to Reality, but when people try to join God and Reality, to identify the one with the other, to find the former in the latter, they are trying to join together two things that were never in need of being joined. This is like trying to make the eyes see themselves.
Yet how do we arrive at the state where to watch the snow falling is so much one with God that we need no more introduce God than put red paint on the roses? Whence all this hurry to arrive at a state? Are you not already watching the snow? Are you not already face-to-face with the eternal mystery? Take it easy for a while; just watch the snow falling or the kettle boiling, and not so much hurry. What’s wrong with watching the snow or the kettle that anyone should want to arrive at a state? It is possible that any ordinary moron can do this just as well, and why not go him one better? How splendid is his ignorance! Like the stones, the grass, and the wind, he has Enlightenment without knowing it, and cannot appreciate his good fortune. Yet, he too, is a so-whatter, for he asks “So what?” when others go questioning for God. He is not free to watch the snow because he can do nothing else, and especially because he does not appreciate his freedom.
But you are free to abandon yourself to actual life and to know that living in God in another name for this abandonment, for watching the snow and walking down the street. And you are free not only because you have once been a so- whatter, but also because you have been living in this abandonment all the time, without knowing it. If you had actually to get into it, to arrive at a state of abandonment where you had not previously been, you would not be free for this would involve going somewhere, arriving tomorrow at a place where you were not yesterday. And tomorrow never comes.
You say you do not feel this abandonment right now. What do you expect to feel? IS it not a feeling; it is feeling. It is not a thought; it is thinking. If it were a particular thought or feeling there could be coming into it and going out of it; but God is One and all-inclusive, and here there can be neither coming nor going, inside or outside. More than this, the great abandonment of Enlightenment does not depend even on feeling and thinking, consciousness or unconsciousness, living or dying, As the verse says:
This you can not describe, nor paint,
Nor yet admire, nor feel.
It is your real self, that has no hiding-place. Destroy the universe, and it remains. No, you can’t feel it—but then how can you know anything about it at all? Because you can use it and feel its use, just as “the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh not whither it goeth.” What is it like to feel its use? This is told in another verse:
Sudden the cold airs swing. Alone, aloud
A verse of bells takes wing. And flies with the cloud.
What Is Reality?
PEOPLE OFTEN SAY THAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR Reality and that they are trying to live. I wonder what that means?
Some time ago a group of people were sitting in a restaurant, and one of them asked the others to say what they meant by Reality. There was much vague discussion, much talk of metaphysics and psychology, but one of those present, when asked his opinion, simply shrugged his shoulders and pointed at the saltshaker. He was amazed to find that no one understood him, yet he had intended to be neither clever nor obscure. His idea was just to give a commonsense answer to the question, on the ordinary assumption that Reality is whatever exists. He was not understood because his friends, in common with many others, regarded Reality as a special kind of existence and Life (with a capital L) as a particular way of living. Thus we often meet those who talk about the difference between being a mere clod, a mere "animated stomach," and areal person; between those who simply exist and those who really live.
In Chinese philosophy Life is called Tao, and the Chinese speak of the wise man as one who realizes (makes real to himself) his accord and harmony with Tao. Therefore, it is asked whether Tao means Life in the sense of simple existence, or whether Tao is Life lived in a special way, lived faithfully, thoroughly, vitally and with a certain zest born of the joy of being alive.
The answer to this question depends solely on why it is asked. Let's see what the Chinese themselves say about it.
A pupil asked his teacher, "What is the Tao?" He answered, "Everyday life is the Tao."
"How," went on the pupil, "does one get into accord with it?"
"If you try to accord with it," said the teacher, "you will get away from it."
Indeed, we have all met those who are trying very hard to be real persons, to give their lives Reality (or meaning) and to live as distinct from existing. These seekers are of many kinds, highbrow and lowbrow, ranging from students of arcane wisdom to the audiences of popular speakers on pep and personality, selling yourself and making your life a success. I have never yet met anyone who tried to become a real person with success. The result of such attempts is invariably loss of personality, for there is an ancient paradox of the spiritual life whereby those who try to make themselves great become small. The paradox is even a bit more complicated than this; it also means that if you try, indirectly, to make yourself great by making yourself small, you succeed only in remaining small. It is all a question of motive, of what you want. Motives may be subtly concealed, and we may not call the desire to be a real person the desire to be great; but that is just a matter of words.
So many modern religions and psychologies make this fundamental mistake of trying to make the tail wag the dog, which is what the quest for personality amounts to. Old-fashioned Christianity was never so stupid, for its aim was never to achieve greatness (or great personality) for man. Its aim was simply to serve God and ascribe all greatness to Him. But in these days so many people find themselves unable to believe in the Christian God, and His more abstract substitutes fail to inspire any genuine devotion and reverence.
So we return to the original question, "What, then, is Life; what is Reality, that it may inspire us with devotion?" If we regard it as a particular way of living or as a particular kind of existence and accord our devotion to that, what are we doing? We are revering its expression in great personality, in the behavior of those whom we consider "real persons." But here is the snag. When we revere real personality in others, we are liable to become mere imitators; when we revere it as an ideal for ourselves, here is the old trouble of wanting to make yourself great. It is all a question of pride, for if you revere Life and Reality only in particular types of personal living, you deny Life and Reality to such humble things as, for instance, saltshakers, specks of dust, worms, flowers, and the great unregenerate masses of the human race. We are reminded of the Pharisee's prayer, thanking God that He had not made him sinful like other men. But a Life, a Reality, a Tao that can be at once a Christ, a Buddha, a Lao-tzu, and an ignorant fool or a worm, this is something really mysterious and wonderful and really worth devotion if you consider it for a while.
The Buddhist scriptures say: "When every phase of our mind is in accord with the Buddha-mind, there shall not be one atom of dust that does not enter into Buddha-hood." For Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.
© Watts
ALTHOUGH ZEN IS A WORD OF ONLY THREE LETTERS, three volumes would not explain it, nor even three libraries of volumes. If one were to compile books on the subject to the end of time, they would not explain it, for all that could be written would only be ideas about Zen, not Zen itself. Indeed, whoever imagines he has explained Zen has in fact only explained it away; it can no more be bound by a definition than the wind can be shut in a box without ceasing to be wind. Thus any attempt to write on Zen may seem an absurdity from the beginning, but that is only so if either reader or writer imagines that Zen can be contained in a set of ideas. A book about London is in no sense London itself, and no sane person would dream of thinking that it is. Yet apparently intelligent people often make the equally ridiculous mistake of identifying a philosophical system, a dogma, a creed, with Ultimate Truth, imagining that they have found that Truth embraced in a set of propositions which appeals to their reason. There are thousands of men and women searching through volume after volume, visiting religious societies, and attending the lectures of famous teachers in the vain hope that they will one day come upon some explanation of the mysteries of life: some saying, some idea, which will contain the solution to the Infinite Riddle. Some continue the search till they die, others imagine that in various ideologies they have found what they desire, and a few penetrate beyond ideas about Truth to Truth itself. There are some religions and philosophies which lend themselves more easily than others to the error of mistaking the idea for the reality, religions in which the creed and the symbol are emphasized at the expense of the spiritual experience which they are intended to embody. This, however, is less a reflection on those religions than on the ignorance of their devotees. But there is at least one cult in which this error is almost impossible, precisely because it has no creed, no philosophical system, no canon of scriptures, no intellectually comprehensible doctrine. So far as it can be called a definite cult at all, it consists of devices for freeing the soul from its fetters, devices which are picturesquely described as fingers pointing at the moon—and he is a fool who mistakes the finger for the moon. This cult is Zen, a form of Buddhism that developed in China and now flourishes principally in Japan. Zen is itself a Japanese word, derived from the Chinese Ch'an or Ch'an-na, a form of the Sanskrit dhyana, which is usually rendered in English as "meditation" or "contemplation." This, however, is a misleading translation, for although in the terminology of yoga dhyana signifies a certain state of contemplation, a state of what we should somewhat inaccurately call "trance," Zen is a far more inclusive term. We come nearer to its meaning if we remember that the word dhyana is related to gñana (the Greek gnosis) or Knowledge in the very highest sense of that word, which is to say supreme spiritual enlightenment. Gñana (another form of which is sometimes spelled dzyan) is very close to Zen, the more so when we remember that Zen is said to have come into the world at the moment when Gautama the Buddha found Enlightenment when sitting one night under the famous Bodhi Tree at Bodh-gaya in northern India. There, according to the teachers of Zen, he found something which cannot be expressed in any form of words; an experience which every man must undergo for himself; which can no more be passed on from one man to another than you can eat another person's food for him.
Zen, however, as a specific cult, is mainly a product of the Chinese mind. Buddhism developed in India as a highly subtle and abstract system of philosophy, a cult of sublime other-worldliness perfectly suited to the inhabitants of a hot climate where life is able to flourish with little labour. The Chinese and Japanese, on the other hand, have a climate nearer to our own and have the same practical bent as the peoples of northern Europe. Perhaps the greatest triumph of Buddhism is that it was able to adapt itself to a mentality so far removed from the Indian. Thus Zen has been described as the Chinese revolt against Buddhism. It would be nearer the truth to call it the Chinese interpretation of Buddhism, although the term "revolt" certainly conveys the fierce, almost iconoclastic character of Zen—a cult which has no patience with any practice or formula which has not immediate relationship with the one thing of importance: Enlightenment. To understand this revolt or interpretation (or better, "revolutionary interpretation") some of the fundamental principles of Buddhism must be borne in mind.
The Buddha, who lived some 600 years BCE, taught that life, as we live it, is necessarily unharmonious because of the selfish, possessive attitude we adopt towards it. In Sanskrit this attitude is called trishna (often mistranslated "desire"), and though there is no one word for it in English, it may be understood as the craving to resist change, to "save our own skins" at all costs, to possess those whom we love; in fact, to hold on to life "like grim death." And that particular phrase has its moral. If anything that lives and moves is held, it dies just like a plucked flower. Egotism is a fierce holding on to oneself; it is building oneself up in a haughty stronghold, refusing to join in the play of life, refusing to accept the eternal laws of change of movement to which all are subject. But that refusal can only be illusion. Whether we like it or not, change comes, and the greater the resistance, the greater the pain. Buddhism perceives the beauty of change, for life is like music in this: if any note or phrase is held for longer than its appointed time, the melody is lost. Thus Buddhism may be summed up in two phrases: "Let go!" and "Walk on!" Drop the craving for self, for permanence, for particular circumstances, and go straight ahead with the movement of life. The state of mind thereby attained is called Nirvana. But this is a teaching easy to misunderstand, for it is so easy to represent the doctrine of "letting go" as an utter denial of life and the world, and Nirvana as a state infinitely removed from all earthly concerns.
Zen, however, corrected this error in the most surprising and unique manner—so much so that a great part of the Zen teachings may appear at first to be mere buffoonery or nonsense.
A disciple came to Zen Master Chao-chou and asked, "I have just come to this monastery. Would you mind giving me some instruction, please?"
The master replied, "Have you eaten your breakfast yet, or not?"
"Yes, I have, sir."
"Then wash your dishes."
It is said that as a result of this remark the disciple was suddenly enlightened as to the whole meaning of Zen.
On another occasion a master was about to address an assembly of students when a bird began to sing in a nearby tree. The master remained silent until the bird had finished, and then, announcing that his address had been given, went away.
Another master set a pitcher before two of his disciples. "Do not call it a pitcher," he said, "but tell me what it is." One replied, "It cannot be called a piece of wood." The master, however, was not satisfied with this answer, and he turned to the other disciple who simply knocked the pitcher over and walked away.
This action had the master's full approval. It will be asked whether these antics have the least connection with religion, even with ordinary sanity. They are regarded by the exponents of Zen as full of the deepest significance, and when we remember that Zen has been, beyond question, one of the most powerful influences in shaping the art and culture of the Far East, such behavior is entitled to respect. Has it some symbolic meaning? What is it about? The answer is that it has no symbolic meaning, and that it is about nothing. But it is something, and that something is that very obvious but much ignored thing--life. The Zen master is in fact demonstrating life in its actuality; without words or ideas he is teaching his disciples to know life directly. Sometimes in answer to a religious question he will give a smack on the face, returning a reality for an abstraction. If he gave a reasoned answer, the disciple would be able to analyze it, to subject it to intellectual dissection, and to imagine a mere lifeless formula as a living truth. But with a smack, a bird, a pitcher, a heap of dishes there can be no mistake. A smack is here one moment and gone the next. There is nothing you can catch hold of, nothing other than a most lively fact, as much alive as the passing moment which can never be made to stay. And a bird is a bird; you hear its song, but you cannot seize the notes to make them continue.
It just is, and is gone, and you feel the beauty of its song precisely because the notes do not wait for you to analyze them. Therefore the Zen master is not trying to give you ideas about life; he is trying to give you life itself, to make you realize life in and around you, to make you live it instead of being a mere spectator, a mere pedant absorbed in the dry bones of something which the life has long deserted. A symphony is not explained by a mathematical analysis of its notes; the mystery of a woman's beauty is not revealed by a postmortem dissection; and no one ever understood the wonder of a bird on the wing by stuffing it and putting it in a glass case. To understand these things, you must live and move with them as they are alive. The same is true of the universe: no amount of intellectual analysis will explain it, for philosophy and science can only reveal its mechanism, never its meaning or, as the Chinese say, its Tao.
"What is the Tao?" A Zen master answers, "Usual life is the very Tao."
"How does one bring oneself into accord with it?" "If you try to accord with it, you will get away from it."
For to imagine that there is a "you" separate from life which somehow has to accord with life is to fall straight into the trap. If you try to find the Tao, you are at once presupposing a difference befiveen yourself and the Tao. Therefore the Zen masters say nothing about the means for becoming Enlightened, for understanding the Tao. They simply concentrate on Tao itself. When you are reading a book you defeat your purpose altogether if you think about yourself trying to concentrate on it; instead of thinking about what is written, your attention is absorbed in your efforts to concentrate. The secret is to think of the book and forget yourself. But that is not all. The book is of little use to you if you go to the other extreme and simply let it "run away with you." On the contrary, you must bring your own understanding and intelligence to it, and then through the union of your own thoughts and the thoughts in the book, something new is born. This union is the important task; you must just do it, and not waste energy in thinking about doing it. The same is true in Zen. It does not ask that we should so submit ourselves to life that the world altogether masters us and blots us out. There are some who never live, who are always having thoughts about life and feelings about life; others are swept away on the tides of circumstance, so overwhelmed by events that they have nothing of their own.
Buddhism, however, is the Middle Way, and this is not a compromise but a union between opposites to produce a "higher third"; just as man and woman unite to produce a child. The same process is found in almost every religion, in some deeply hidden, in others plainly revealed. In Christianity man must be born anew of water and the spirit, symbols of substance and energy, concrete life and the mind of man. Thus the prayer to Christ to be "born in us" is the hope for the same Enlightenment that we find in Buddhism and the story of Christ's birth is its allegory. For the Holy Ghost is spirit, and Mary (from the Latin word mare—sea, water) is the world, called in Sanskrit maya. And the mother of the Buddha was also called Maya, and he too was supposed to have been miraculously conceived. Thus the realization of the Christ within, the Buddha within, the Tao within, or the Krishna within is in each instance the result of a process which Zen presents to us in this unique and almost startling manner. It is the understanding of the One which lies behind the Many; the bringing together of opposites, of subject and object, the ego and the universe, to create the Holy Child.
And yet we must beware of that definition, of that convenient summary of religious endeavor. It so easily becomes a mere catchphrase, a truth so fastened in a nutshell that it ceases to be of the least use. In its prison it withers away and dies. Therefore Zen comes at this stage with a most inconvenient question, "When the Many are reduced to the One, to what is the One to be reduced?" Only he who knows what that is understands Zen. It would be futile to try to explain any further, for to do so would be to defeat the very purpose of Zen, which is to make everyone find out for himself. It is like a detective story with the last chapter missing; it remains a mystery, a thing like a beam of light which can be seen and used, but never caught—loved, but never possessed. And by that we may know that Zen is life.
The Parable of the Cow's Tail
A FAMOUS ZEN KOAN ASKS:
When a cow goes out of its enclosure to the edge of the abyss, its horns and head and its hoofs all pass through, but why can't the tail also pass?"
Commenting on this, an old master says:
If the cow runs it will fall into the trench; If it returns it will be butchered.
That little tail is a very strange thing.
In the quest for understanding of life there comes a time when everyone is confronted with "that little tail"—the one tiny obstacle that stands in the way of complete fulfillment. We know that it is only a fraction of a hairsbreadth in thickness, and yet we feel it as a million miles wide. There is in mathematics an equation which, when drawn as a graph, appears as a curve that always nears but never touches a given line. At first the curve sweeps boldly towards that line, and the head, horns, and hoofs go clean through the gate, but, just as the tail is about to pass, the curve straightens, leaving just a fraction of an inch between itself and the line. As it moves on, that fraction grows less and less, but still curve and line do not touch, and even though it be continued for a thousand miles or a thousand million miles the gap remains, though at each successive point it becomes smaller. This curve represents the progress of human intellect towards Enlightenment, grasping more and more subtle nuances of meaning at each stage of its journey. It is as if we stood bound to illusion by a hair; to weaken it we split it with the knife of intellect, and split it again until its divisions become so fine that to make its cuts the mind must be sharpened indefinitely. Yet however much we split this hair, the sum total of its divisions is not a whit thinner than the original hair, for the more fragile we make our bonds, the more is their number.
Philosophically this condition is known as infinite regression, and psychologically it is that mad, exasperating state that must always precede the final experience of awakening. We can demonstrate this by the famous triangle puzzle of Mahayana philosophy. The two base points of this triangle represent the pairs of opposites which confront us at every moment of our experience—subject and object, I and you, positive and negative, something and nothing. The apex represents the relation, the meaning between them, the principle that gives them reality, the One as distinct from the Many. But the moment we set this One apart from the Many we create yet another pair of opposites, thus initiating a process which will continue indefinitely with ever-increasing complications. In the Bhagavad Gita we are told to stand aside from our thoughts and feelings, to realize that they are not the Self and learn that the Self is not the actor in actions but the Spectator of actions. But why not stand aside yet again from this first standing aside and perceive that it is not the Self that stands aside, for the Self performs no action? This, too, may continue forever.
The first step in Buddhism is Right Motive, and to attain Enlightenment it is said that we must do away with selfish desire. But if we have selfish desire in the beginning, surely the desire to get rid of it is also selfish. We desire to be rid of our selfishness for a selfish reason, and again we may easily have a selfish reason for getting rid of the selfish reason for wanting to be selfless. An even more fundamental illustration of the problem may be found in the simplest statement of Eastern philosophy, namely, that there is only one Reality and that all diversity is illusion. This is a statement which almost all students of Eastern wisdom take very much for granted: it is the first thing they learn but in fact it is about almost all there is to learn, for the rest is mere embroidery. It is the central principle of Vedanta, Mahayana, and Taoism alike: there are no two principles in the universe; there is only Brahman, Tathata, or Tao, and Enlightenment is just the realization of one's identity with it. But here the complications begin and the cow's tail gets stuck in the gate, for the moment we think, "This is Tao" or "That is Tao" we immediately make a distinction between Tao and this and that. Furthermore, as soon as we think that the object of religion is to identify ourselves with the Tao, we create the dualism of the Tao and ourselves that are to be identified with it. Dualism appears the moment we make an assertion or a denial about anything; as soon as we think that This is That or This is not That we have the distinction between This and That. And even when we say that in Reality there are no distinctions, we have the opposition of Reality and distinctions.
Moreover, let us consider this problem: if there is only Tao, how can there be any divergence from it? If there is only one Reality, our thoughts, enlightened or unenlightened, must be it. There can be no distinction between Reality and illusion if there is only Reality. Whether you can concentrate your thoughts or not, whether they are of compassion or hatred, whether you are thinking about Buddhism or chewing your nails, you cannot by any means diverge from the Tao. You may love life or you may loathe it, yet your loving and loathing are themselves manifestations of life. If you seek union with Reality your very seeking is Reality, and how can you say that you have ever lost union?
To put it in another way: it is said that to be enlightened we must live in the eternal. Now, that infinitely small and therefore infinitely great point of time is called the present moment. The universe exists only in that moment, and it is said that the wise man moves with it, clinging neither to the past nor to the future, making his mind like the mirror that reflects everything instantly as it comes before it, yet making no effort to retain the reflection when the object is removed. "The perfect man," says Chuang-tzu, "employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep."
Yet, when the matter is carefully considered, we find that this is a description, not of what we should do, but of what we cannot help doing in any case. For whether we think of the past or the future, and whatever we think about either of them, our thoughts exist in and partake of the eternal Now; otherwise they would not exist at all. We cannot separate ourselves from this present moment, and if we imagine that Enlightenment consists simply in living in the present, in thinking only about what is going on now, we find ourselves in the dualism of now and then. The point is that we can only think of what is going on now, even if we are thinking of the past or the future. For our thoughts about past and future are going on now, and we are thinking them. There is only one Reality! Therefore it will be asked: "Is Enlightenment simply to live and think like any ignorant fool, not bothering about philosophy, mysticism, or morality, knowing that whatever you do you cannot get out of harmony with the Tao?"
If we answer, "Yes," we assert; if we say, "No," we deny. The tail is still caught in the gate. But if you think that you will attain Enlightenment by living like an ignorant fool, you are still caught in the dualism of the you that must attain enlightenment. Indeed, there is no prescription for enlightenment, for as soon as we start saying that it is this or it is not this, we try to make two realities in the universe instead of one. In fact, you can think about philosophy, or about eating and drinking, you can love mankind, you can hate it, you can do as you like, you can do as you don't like, you can discipline yourself, you can run wild, you can seek wisdom, you can ignore it, but you can't diverge from the Tao, for everything, anything, and nothing is Tao. Is it? Beware of that "is." The sting is in the tail.
The Second Immortal
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A MAN WHO LIVED much as other men live. He had a wife and three children and a shop in the Street of Happy Sparrows where he sold cakes, vegetables, and sweet pickles. He rose at dawn and went to bed at sunset; he ate rice three times a day; he smoked two pipes of tobacco in the hour; he talked of buying and selling with his neighbors; he picked his teeth after eating and had his wife scratch his back in the noonday heat. In spring he watched the young grass peeping out from behind the stones; in the summer he lifted an eye at the lazy clouds; in autumn he followed the leaves that danced in the wind; and in the winter he woke to see the tracks of birds in the snow. And in all seasons, between talking and smoking and selling cakes, he chewed watermelon seeds and amused himself by plaiting straw ropes round his toes.
One day, when he went to burn incense at the Temple of Amiable Dragons, his friend the priest approached him, saying: "You are getting on in years and your eldest son is of an age to take care of your shop. It would not be proper for a man such as you to spend the rest of your days in empty activities, for you will go to the grave as insignificantly as old refuse is flung into the river."
"Such being the lot of man," answered the cakeseller, "how can I complain?"
"So many are mere vegetables." said the priest. "But if you are willing to take the trouble you can find yourself a place among the Immortals."
"And who," asked the cakeseller, "are the Immortals?"
"They are those who do not depend on their own power to keep themselves alive. Man is a small creature whose life is like a snowflake. But the wind blows on forever; the sun and moon eternally maintain their courses and the rivers have flowed since time began. The Immortals are they who learn the secrets of these things; instead of relying on their own resources, they allow themselves to be maintained and directed by that which maintains and directs the wind, the sun, the moon, and the rivers."
"But how can one become an Immortal?"
"You will have to find an Immortal to teach you," said the priest. "I am not wise enough."
"Well," said the cakeseller. "I must find one. But there are so many people in the world, and how can one recognize an Immortal?"
"That should not be difficult," answered the priest. "It is said that their breath is operated by the wind; that the sun gives them the light of the right eye and the moon of the left; that their shouting is assisted by the thunder, their whispering by the murmuring waves and their laughter by the mountain streams. The earth, it is said, maintains their flesh, while their bones and vital juices are supplied by the rocks and the rains. Their thoughts and moods are directed by the coming and going of the seasons and the elements, and having such mighty ones as the movers of all their functions they are said to be free from all the ordinary limitations and more powerful even than the gods."
"Such a strange being," observed the cakeseller, "should be easy to recognize," and immediately he returned home, set his affairs in order, instructing his eldest son in the care of the shop, and the same evening left the city on his journey in search of an Immortal. After many weeks upon the road he came to a hut inhabited by an ancient personage of severe aspect who seemed to him to be at least two hundred years old. His white beard caressed the upper part of his shoes and the top of his head glistened like the elbows of an old coat. Noticing his venerable appearance and also the many volumes of the classics with which he was surrounded, the cakeseller at once approached him and begged for instruction, thinking that surely this must be an Immortal, for he was the most aged person he had ever seen. "It is a long time," said the venerable one, "since my advice was asked upon anything, for this is a dissolute age, and the mastery of life is not understood by those who fail to observe the forty-eight precepts and fail to avoid the ninety-one indiscretions. Sit down, and I will instruct you in the words of the ancient sages." Whereupon he began to read from the classics, and the cakeseller sat and listened until the sun went down. And on the following day he read yet more, and again on the next day and the next and the next, and so on, until the cakeseller almost lost count of time. And he was instructed and made to discipline himself in the eight virtuous deeds, the twenty-nine laudable thoughts, the one hundred and eight ceremonial observances, the forty-two marks of superior character, the thirty-seven acts of filial piety and the four hundred and three propitiations of ill-disposed spirits. And all the while the cakeseller grew in righteousness and high-minded conduct, and was disposed to believing himself well on the way to immortality. But one day he remembered suddenly that he had now been with the venerable scholar for some twenty years; the days of his life were growing shorter and yet he knew nothing of the secrets of the sun, moon, rivers, wind, and the elements. At this he was filled with agitation, and in the night set out upon the road again.
After some weeks of wandering in the mountains he came upon a cave where a strange being sat at the entrance. His limbs were like the trunk of a gnarled pine, his hair like wisps of smoke drifting on the wind and his eyes staring and fiery like those of a snake. Duly impressed, the cakeseller again begged for instruction.
"Immortals," said this person, "have the wind as their breath. and to learn this you must cultivate the art of the Expansive Lungs. But this cannot be learned by such as you who chew melon seeds and smoke two pipes an hour and eat three meals a day. If you would have the wind as your breath, you must eat but one grain of rice in a day and drink one cup of water. You must clear the smoke from your windpipe, and learn to breathe but twice in a day. Only then will your lungs be able to contain the wind."
So the cakeseller sat down at the mouth of the cave, ate but one grain of rice and drank but one cup of water a day. And under the instructions of the sage he was made to lessen and lessen the speed of his breath till he thought his eyes would proceed from their sockets and the drums of his ears disturb all the birds of the forest with their bursting. But for many years he practiced until he did indeed breathe but twice a day, at the end of which he saw that his body was as a skeleton hung with skin as spiderwebs cover the branches of a bush, and with a display of exceedingly ill-regulated conduct he fled from the cave.
For many more months he searched for an instruction and finding none began to wonder whether he had perhaps not persevered enough with his teacher. So he began to make his way back to the mountains. On the way he caught up with an itinerant trader who carried a pole over his shoulder to which was attached a bundle containing an assortment of pots, beads, combs, dolls, kitchen utensils, writing materials, seeds, scissors, and sticks of incense. For a while they kept each other company, conversing on idle matters such as the state of the crops, the best ways of driving out fleas, the pleasures of soft rainfall and the various kinds of charcoal useful for making fires. At length the cakeseller told the trader of his desire to find an Immortal who could instruct him and asked whether he knew of any such person. "Have a melon seed," said the trader, offering him a handful. "Indeed, I regret I cannot eat melon seeds," cried the cakeseller, "for if I chew them it will take away my power of Expansive Lungs." The trader shrugged his shoulders, and for a while they walked on in silence, broken only by the cracking of melon seeds between the trader's teeth - a sound which filled the cakeseller with a variety of emotions. On the one hand he began to feel an urge to break his discipline, and once more feel that eminently satisfying crack of seeds between the teeth; on the other he felt he should persist in his search and again ask the trader about the Immortals. Perhaps, he thought, the trader had never heard of Immortals, but it might be that he would recognize such beings if he knew what they were like. I was wondering," said the cakeseller, "whether in your journeyings you have happened to meet with anyone of strange and powerful aspect, whose breath is operated by the wind, whose right and left eyes are given light by the sun and moon respectively, whose shouting is assisted by the thunder, whispering by the murmuring waves and laughter by the mountain streams; whose flesh is maintained by the earth, whose bones and vital juices are supplied by the rocks and the rains, and whose thoughts and moods are directed by the coming and going of the seasons and the elements."
"Oh yes," answered the trader, "I have seen many such beings. Why, I believe that two of them are making their way along this road."
"What!" cried the cakeseller. "On this very road? Let us hurry so that we can catch up with them!" And so they increased pace, and when night fell they did not pause to rest, for the cakeseller persuaded the trader that it would be well to gain upon them by a night's journey. At sunrise they found themselves on the top of a hill from which they could see the road ahead for many miles, but as they looked down upon it there was no one anywhere to be seen.
"It may be," said the cakeseller, "that we overtook them during the night."
Whereat they looked behind and again a view of many miles showed them an empty road. At this the cakeseller was very sad.
"They must have taken a side-track into the mountains," he said, "for it seems that we are the only people on this road."
"Oh," said the trader, "I forgot to tell you. When they go about in pairs one of them is always invisible. You are looking for two men traveling together. Let us look again."
Once more the cakeseller gazed up the road and down the road, but saw no other man upon it than his companion, the trader.
"No," sighed the cakeseller, "we have missed them. I see neither two nor one."
"Are you sure?" replied the trader. "I really believe I can see one. Look again."
"No," said the cakeseller, "I see no man on the road at all, excepting yourself."
At this the trader began to laugh, and as he laughed it seemed to the cakeseller that his laughter was like the sound of a mountain stream
"You!" he exclaimed. "Are you an Immortal? But you look like an ordinary man!"
"Indeed," laughed the trader, "I must confess it. You see, I have to go about in disguise, for otherwise I should be followed all over the place, which would be most inconvenient."
"But your invisible companion, asked the cakeseller, is he also here? Does he look like an Immortal? Describe him to me."
"Surely," answered the trader. "His breathing is operated by the wind but you do not notice it; the light of his right and left eyes is given by the sun and moon, but you do not see it; his shouting is of the thunder, his whispering of the waves, and his laughter of the mountain streams, but you do not hear it; his flesh is maintained by the earth, and his bones and vital juices by the rocks and rains, but you do not understand it; his thoughts and moods are directed by the coming and going of the seasons and the elements, but you are not aware of it. He does not rely on his own resources; he allows himself to be maintained and directed by that which maintains and directs the wind, the sun, the moon, and the rivers, but you do not recognize it."
"Marvelous indeed must he be to look upon!" exclaimed the cakeseller. "Please ask him to become visible so that I can understand his secrets."
"You had better ask yourself," replied the trader. "Only you have the power to make him visible. There is a magic by which you can make him appear."
"Tell me about it." "The magic," answered the trader, "is this: in the spring to watch the young grass peeping out between the stones; in summer to lift an eye at the lazy clouds; in autumn to follow the leaves that dance in the wind; in winter to wake and find the tracks of birds in the snow. To rise at dawn and go to sleep at sunset; to eat rice three times in a day; to talk of buying and selling with one's neighbors; to chew the seeds of water melon and to plait straw ropes around the toes."
And at this the cakeseller discovered the second Immortal.
Tomorrow Never Comes
WHEN WE SAY THAT ALL THINGS IN THE UNIVERSE are the creative activity of God, this is really like putting legs on a snake or painting the reflection on a mirror. It is not to be compared to seeing that activity as it is, although we say that it is God’s activity to draw attention to it in a particular way. But the trouble is that people spend so much energy looking for the God that they fail to see the activity, which is surely a sad state of affairs. What is this activity? The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street. Really we should need to say no more than this, but it is sometimes called the activity of God to point out a certain understanding to the sort of person who might retort, “The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street—so what?
So what? Well, what else are you looking for? Here is someone who eats out the grocer’s store and still complains that he is starving. But the word and concept God, Brahmin, Tao or what you will, was really introduced for such unappreciative stomachs. It is a way of emphasizing actual life to draw attention to it in much the same way as we underline words or put them in italics. Thus we call the universe the activity of God to induce the so-whatever to pay some attention and reverence to it, because he always bolts his life instead of rolling it appreciatively round his tongue. He always thinks of the second and third piece of cake while he is eating the first, and thus is never satisfied with any of them, and ends up with a thoroughly disordered digestion. This is called the vicious circle of having lunch for breakfast, or living for your future. But tomorrow never comes.
The snow is falling on the windowsill. Is this the activity of God? Maybe. But if anyone watches it in order to see God he will surely be disappointed. “No man hath seen God.” No, and in looking for God he may fail to see the snow. “Thou art Brahman!” But if you look in yourself in order to find Brahman, you will be very disappointed indeed. Yet all this trouble has started because people have taken a simple device much too far. The idea of God is a finger pointing the way to Reality, but when people try to join God and Reality, to identify the one with the other, to find the former in the latter, they are trying to join together two things that were never in need of being joined. This is like trying to make the eyes see themselves.
Yet how do we arrive at the state where to watch the snow falling is so much one with God that we need no more introduce God than put red paint on the roses? Whence all this hurry to arrive at a state? Are you not already watching the snow? Are you not already face-to-face with the eternal mystery? Take it easy for a while; just watch the snow falling or the kettle boiling, and not so much hurry. What’s wrong with watching the snow or the kettle that anyone should want to arrive at a state? It is possible that any ordinary moron can do this just as well, and why not go him one better? How splendid is his ignorance! Like the stones, the grass, and the wind, he has Enlightenment without knowing it, and cannot appreciate his good fortune. Yet, he too, is a so-whatter, for he asks “So what?” when others go questioning for God. He is not free to watch the snow because he can do nothing else, and especially because he does not appreciate his freedom.
But you are free to abandon yourself to actual life and to know that living in God in another name for this abandonment, for watching the snow and walking down the street. And you are free not only because you have once been a so- whatter, but also because you have been living in this abandonment all the time, without knowing it. If you had actually to get into it, to arrive at a state of abandonment where you had not previously been, you would not be free for this would involve going somewhere, arriving tomorrow at a place where you were not yesterday. And tomorrow never comes.
You say you do not feel this abandonment right now. What do you expect to feel? IS it not a feeling; it is feeling. It is not a thought; it is thinking. If it were a particular thought or feeling there could be coming into it and going out of it; but God is One and all-inclusive, and here there can be neither coming nor going, inside or outside. More than this, the great abandonment of Enlightenment does not depend even on feeling and thinking, consciousness or unconsciousness, living or dying, As the verse says:
This you can not describe, nor paint,
Nor yet admire, nor feel.
It is your real self, that has no hiding-place. Destroy the universe, and it remains. No, you can’t feel it—but then how can you know anything about it at all? Because you can use it and feel its use, just as “the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh not whither it goeth.” What is it like to feel its use? This is told in another verse:
Sudden the cold airs swing. Alone, aloud
A verse of bells takes wing. And flies with the cloud.
What Is Reality?
PEOPLE OFTEN SAY THAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR Reality and that they are trying to live. I wonder what that means?
Some time ago a group of people were sitting in a restaurant, and one of them asked the others to say what they meant by Reality. There was much vague discussion, much talk of metaphysics and psychology, but one of those present, when asked his opinion, simply shrugged his shoulders and pointed at the saltshaker. He was amazed to find that no one understood him, yet he had intended to be neither clever nor obscure. His idea was just to give a commonsense answer to the question, on the ordinary assumption that Reality is whatever exists. He was not understood because his friends, in common with many others, regarded Reality as a special kind of existence and Life (with a capital L) as a particular way of living. Thus we often meet those who talk about the difference between being a mere clod, a mere "animated stomach," and areal person; between those who simply exist and those who really live.
In Chinese philosophy Life is called Tao, and the Chinese speak of the wise man as one who realizes (makes real to himself) his accord and harmony with Tao. Therefore, it is asked whether Tao means Life in the sense of simple existence, or whether Tao is Life lived in a special way, lived faithfully, thoroughly, vitally and with a certain zest born of the joy of being alive.
The answer to this question depends solely on why it is asked. Let's see what the Chinese themselves say about it.
A pupil asked his teacher, "What is the Tao?" He answered, "Everyday life is the Tao."
"How," went on the pupil, "does one get into accord with it?"
"If you try to accord with it," said the teacher, "you will get away from it."
Indeed, we have all met those who are trying very hard to be real persons, to give their lives Reality (or meaning) and to live as distinct from existing. These seekers are of many kinds, highbrow and lowbrow, ranging from students of arcane wisdom to the audiences of popular speakers on pep and personality, selling yourself and making your life a success. I have never yet met anyone who tried to become a real person with success. The result of such attempts is invariably loss of personality, for there is an ancient paradox of the spiritual life whereby those who try to make themselves great become small. The paradox is even a bit more complicated than this; it also means that if you try, indirectly, to make yourself great by making yourself small, you succeed only in remaining small. It is all a question of motive, of what you want. Motives may be subtly concealed, and we may not call the desire to be a real person the desire to be great; but that is just a matter of words.
So many modern religions and psychologies make this fundamental mistake of trying to make the tail wag the dog, which is what the quest for personality amounts to. Old-fashioned Christianity was never so stupid, for its aim was never to achieve greatness (or great personality) for man. Its aim was simply to serve God and ascribe all greatness to Him. But in these days so many people find themselves unable to believe in the Christian God, and His more abstract substitutes fail to inspire any genuine devotion and reverence.
So we return to the original question, "What, then, is Life; what is Reality, that it may inspire us with devotion?" If we regard it as a particular way of living or as a particular kind of existence and accord our devotion to that, what are we doing? We are revering its expression in great personality, in the behavior of those whom we consider "real persons." But here is the snag. When we revere real personality in others, we are liable to become mere imitators; when we revere it as an ideal for ourselves, here is the old trouble of wanting to make yourself great. It is all a question of pride, for if you revere Life and Reality only in particular types of personal living, you deny Life and Reality to such humble things as, for instance, saltshakers, specks of dust, worms, flowers, and the great unregenerate masses of the human race. We are reminded of the Pharisee's prayer, thanking God that He had not made him sinful like other men. But a Life, a Reality, a Tao that can be at once a Christ, a Buddha, a Lao-tzu, and an ignorant fool or a worm, this is something really mysterious and wonderful and really worth devotion if you consider it for a while.
The Buddhist scriptures say: "When every phase of our mind is in accord with the Buddha-mind, there shall not be one atom of dust that does not enter into Buddha-hood." For Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.
© Watts