Alan Watts

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (4) – Noble Truth #1

AW: So the concern of Buddha as a young man—the problem he wanted to solve—was the problem of human suffering. And so he formulated his teaching in a very easy way to remember. All those Buddhist scriptures are full of what you might call mnemonic tricks; numbering things in such a way that they’re easy to remember. And so he summed up his teaching in the form of what are called the Four Noble Truths. And the first one, because it was his main concern, was the truth about dukkha. Dukkha: suffering, pain, frustration, chronic dis-ease. It is the opposite of sukha, which means sweet, pleasure, et cetera.

So, insofar as the problem posed in Buddhism is dukkha, “I don’t want to suffer, and I want to find someone or something that can cure me of suffering.” That’s the problem. Now then, if there’s a person who solves the problem—a buddha—people come to him and say, “Master, how do we get out of this problem?” So what he does is to propose certain things to them.

First of all, he points out that with dukkha go two other things. These are respectively called anitya and anātman. Anitya means—‘nitya’ means ‘permanent,’ so impermanence, flux, change, is characteristic of everything whatsoever. There isn’t anything at all in the whole world—in the material world, in the psychic world, in the spiritual world—there is nothing you can catch hold of and hang on to for safety. Nothing. Not only is there nothing you can hang on to, but by the teaching of anātman, there is no ‘you’ to hang on to it. In other words, all clinging to life is an illusory hand grasping at smoke. If you can get that into your head and see that that is so, nobody needs to tell you that you ought not to grasp. Because you see you can’t.

Buddhism is not essentially moralistic. The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile. Because what happens is he simply sweeps the dust under the carpet, and it comes back again somehow. But in this case, it involves a complete realization that this is the case. So that’s what the teacher puts across, to begin with.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (5) – Noble Truth #2

AW: The next thing that comes up—the second of the noble truths—is about the cause of suffering, and this, in Sanskrit, is called tṛṣṇā. Tṛṣṇā is related to our word ‘thirst.’ It’s very often translated ‘desire;’ that will do. Better, perhaps, is ‘craving,’ ‘clinging,’ ‘grasping,’ or even, to use our modern psychological word, ‘blocking.’ When, for example, somebody is blocked, and dithers and hesitates, and doesn’t know what to do, he is in the strictest Buddhist sense attached; he’s stuck. But a buddha can’t be stuck. He cannot be fazed. He always flows, just as water always flows, even if you dam it; the river just keeps on getting higher and higher and higher, until it flows over the dam. It’s unstoppable.

Buddha said, dukkha comes from tṛṣṇā. You all suffer because you cling to the world, and you don’t recognize that the world is anitya and anātman. So then, try, if you can, not to grasp. Well, do you see that that immediately poses a problem? Because the student who has started off this dialogue with the buddha then makes various efforts to give up desire. Upon which he very rapidly discovers that he is desiring not to desire, and he takes that back to the teacher, who says, “Well, well, well.” He said, “Of course. You are desiring not to desire, and that’s, of course, excessive. All I want you to do is to give up desiring as much as you can. Don’t want to go beyond the point of which you’re capable.” And for this reason, Buddhism is called the Middle Way. Not only is it the middle way between the extremes of ascetic discipline and pleasure-seeking, but it’s also the middle way in a very subtle sense. Yes, don’t desire to give up more desire than you can. And if you find that a problem, don’t desire to be successful in giving up more desire than you can. You see what’s happening? At every time he’s returned to the middle way; he’s moved out of an extreme situation.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (6) – Noble Truth #3

AW: The next truth in the list is concerned with the nature of release from dukkha. And so number three is nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa is the goal of Buddhism; it’s the state of liberation corresponding to what the Hindus call mokṣa. The word means ‘blow out,’ and it comes from the root nivṛtti. Now, some people think that what it means is ‘blowing out the flame of desire.’ I don’t believe this. I believe that it means ‘breathe out,’ rather than ‘blow out,’ because if you try to hold your breath—and in Indian thought prāṇa, breath, is the life principle—if you try to hold on to life, you lose it. You can’t hold your breath and stay alive; it becomes extremely uncomfortable to hold on to your breath. And so, in exactly the same way, it becomes extremely uncomfortable to spend all your time holding on to life. What the devil is the point of surviving—going on living—when it’s a drag?

But you see, that’s what people do. They spend enormous efforts on maintaining a certain standard of living, which is a great deal of trouble. You know, you get a nice house in the suburbs, and the first thing you do is you plant a lawn. You’ve gotta get out and mow the damn thing all the time. And you buy expensive this-that, and soon you’re all involved in mortgages, and instead of being able to walk out in the garden and enjoy it, you sit at your desk looking at all the books and filling out this, that, and the other, and paying bills, and answering letters. What a lot of rot! But, you see, that is holding on to life. So, translated into colloquial American, nirvāṇa is ‘whew!’ Because if you let your breath go, it’ll come back. So nirvāṇa is not annihilation. It’s not disappearance into a sort of undifferentiated void. Nirvāṇa is the state of being let go. It is a state of consciousness, and a state of—you might call it—being, here and now in this life.

[stardustpilgrim]

This is pretty cool...

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (7) – Noble Truth #4

AW: We now come to the most complicated of all. Number four, mārga. Mārg, in Sanskrit, means ‘path,’ and the Buddha taught an eightfold path for the realization of nirvāṇa.

What is important is this: the eightfold path has really got three divisions in it. The first are concerned with understanding, the second division is concerned with conduct, and the third division is concerned with meditation.

And every step in the path is preceded with the Sanskrit word samyak, in which sam is the keyword. In Pali: sammā. And so, the first step, samyak dṛṣṭi, which means—dṛṣṭi means a ‘view,’ ‘a way of looking at things,’ a ‘vision,’ an ‘attitude,’ something like that. But this word samyak is in ordinary texts on Buddhism almost invariably translated ‘right.’ This is a very bad translation. The word is used in certain contexts in Sanskrit to mean ‘right,’ ‘correct,’ but it has other and wider meanings. Sam means—like our word ‘sum,’ which is derived from it—‘complete,’ ‘total,’ ‘all-embracing.’ It also has the meaning of ‘middle-wayed,’ representing, as it were, the fulcrum, the center, the point of balance in a totality. Middle-wayed way of looking at things. Middle-wayed way of understanding the dharma. Middle-wayed way of speech, of conduct, of livelihood, and so on. Now, this is particularly cogent when it comes to Buddhist ideas of behavior.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (8) – The Five Good Conducts

AW: Every Buddhist in all the world, practically, as a layman—if he’s not a monk—undertakes what are called pañcaśīlā, the Five Good Conducts. Sīla is sometimes translated ‘precept.’ But it’s not a precept because it’s not a commandment. The formula when Buddhists—you know, these priests, they chant the precepts— ‘I promise to abstain from.’ So the first is that one undertakes not to destroy life. Second, not to take what is not given. Third—this is usually translated ‘not to commit adultery.’ It doesn’t say anything of the kind. In Sanskrit [it] means ‘I undertake the precept to abstain from exploiting my passions.’ Buddhism has no doctrine about adultery; you may have as many wives as you like.

But the point is this: when you’re feeling blue and bored, it’s not a good idea to have a drink, because you may become dependent on alcohol whenever you feel unhappy. So, in the same way, when you’re feeling blue and bored, it’s not a good idea to say “Let’s go out and get some chicks and have some sex-fun.” That’s exploiting the passions. But it’s not exploiting the passions, you see, when drinking, say, expresses the conviviality and friendship of the group sitting around the dinner table, or when sex expresses the spontaneous delight of two people in each other.

Then, the fourth precept, musāvāda: ‘to abstain from false speech.’ This doesn’t simply mean lying. It means abusing people. It means using speech in a phony way, like saying ‘all black persons are thus and so.’ Or ‘the attitude of America to this situation is thus and thus.‘ See, that’s phony kind of talking. Anybody who studies general semantics will be helped in avoiding musāvāda; false speech.

The final [fifth] precept is a very complicated one, and nobody’s quite sure exactly what it means. It mentions three kinds of drugs and drinks: sura, meraya, majja, pamadatthana. We don’t know what they are, but at any rate, it’s generally classed as narcotics and liquors. Now, there are two ways of translating this precept. One says to abstain from narcotics and liquors. The other, liberal, translation favored by the great scholar Dr. Malalasekera is, “I abstain from being intoxicated by these things.” So if you drink and don’t get intoxicated, it’s okay, you see? You don’t have to be a teetotaler to be a Buddhist. This is especially true in Japan and China—my goodness, how they throw it down! Once, a scholarly Chinese said to me, “You know, before you start meditating, just have a couple of martinis, because it increases your progress by about six months.”

Now you see, these are not commandments. They are vows. Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by some kind of cosmic lawgiver. And the reason why these precepts are undertaken is not for a sentimental reason. It is not that they’re going to make you into a good person. It is that, for anybody interested in the experiments necessary for liberation, these ways of life are expedient [if you don’t want to pass your life seeing things through a dim haze, which is not exactly awakening].

[Reefs]

Sept 12, 2020 19:33:30 GMT -5 stardustpilgrim said:

This is pretty cool...

Most excellent! Is there a transcript somewhere?

[stardustpilgrim]

Sept 15, 2020 23:56:05 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Sept 12, 2020 19:33:30 GMT -5 stardustpilgrim said:

This is pretty cool...

Most excellent! Is there a transcript somewhere?

It appears to be just a recording.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (9) – The Nature of Change

AW: You must understand, as one of the fundamental points of Buddhism, the idea of the world as being in flux. I gave you the Sanskrit word anitya as one of the characteristics of being, emphasized by the Buddha along with anātman, the unreality of a permanent self, and dukkha, the sense of frustration. Dukkha really arises from a person’s failure to accept the other two characteristics: lack of permanent self and change.

When I watch a whirlpool in a stream—here’s the stream flowing along, and there’s always a whirlpool like the one at Niagra. But that whirlpool never, never really holds any water. The water is all the time rushing through it. In the same way, a university—the University of California—what is it? The students change at least every four years, the faculty changes at a somewhat slower rate, the buildings change—they knock them down and put up new ones—the administration changes. So what is the University of California? It’s a pattern. A doing of a particular kind. And so in just precisely that way, every one of us is a whirlpool in the tide of existence, and wherein every cell in our body, every molecule, every atom is in constant flux, and nothing can be pinned down.

But this is fundamental to Buddhistic philosophy. The philosophy of change. From one point of view, change is just too bad. Everything flows away, and there’s a kind of sadness in that, a kind of nostalgia, and there may be even a rage. “Go not gently into that good night, but rage, rage, at the dying of the light.”

But there’s something curious. There can be a very fundamental change in one’s attitude to the question of the world as fading. On the one hand, resentment, and on the other, delight. If you resist change—of course, you must to some extent. When you meet another person, you don’t want to be thoroughly rejected, but you love to feel a little resistance. Don’t you? You have a beautiful girl, and you touch her. You don’t want her to go, “Bleugh!” But so round, so firm, so fully packed! A little bit of resistance, you see, is great. So there must always be resistance in change; otherwise, there couldn’t be even change. There’d just be a “Pffft.” The world would go, “Pffft,” and that’d be the end of it.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (10) – Reincarnation

AW: But because there’s always some resistance to change, there is a wonderful manifestation of form; there is a dance of life. But the human mind, as distinct from most animal minds, is terribly aware of time. And so we think a great deal about the future, and we know that every visible form is going to disappear and be replaced by so-called others. Are these others, others? Or are they the same forms returning? Of course, that’s a great puzzle. Are next year’s leaves that come from a tree going to be the same as this year’s leaves? What do you mean by the same? They’ll be the same shape, they’ll have the same botanical characteristics. But you’ll be able to pick up a shriveled leaf from last autumn and say, “Look at the difference. This is last year’s leaf. This is this year’s leaf.” And in that sense, they’re not the same.

What happens when any great musician plays a certain piece of music? He plays it today, and then he plays it again tomorrow. Is it the same piece of music, or is it another? In the Pali language, they say nacha so nacha anno, which means ‘not the same, and yet not another.’ So, in this way, the Buddhist is able to speak of reincarnation of beings, without having to believe in some kind of soul-entity that is reincarnated. Some kind of Ātman—some kind of fixed self, ego-principle, soul-principle—that moves from one life to another. And this is as true in our lives as they go on now, from moment to moment, as it would be true of our lives as they appear and reappear again over millions of years. It doesn’t make the slightest difference, except that there are long intervals and short intervals, high vibrations and low vibrations. When you hear a high sound, high note in the musical scale, you can’t see any holes in it—it’s going too fast—and it sounds completely continuous. But when you get the lowest audible notes that one can hear on an organ, you feel the shaking. You feel the vibration, you hear that music going “dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun”, on and off.

So in the same way as we live now, from day to day, we experience ourselves living at a high rate of vibration, and we appear to be continuous—although there is the rhythm of waking and sleeping. But the rhythm that runs from generation to generation and from life to life is much slower, and so we notice the gaps. We don’t notice the gaps when the rhythm is fast.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (11) – The Mystery of Change

AW: So we are living on many, many levels of rhythm. This is the nature of change. If you resist it you have dukkha; you have frustration and suffering. But, on the other hand, if you understand change, you don’t cling to it, and you let it flow, then it’s no problem. It becomes positively beautiful, which is why—in poetry—the theme of the evanescence of the world is beautiful. When Shelley says:

The one remains, the many change and pass,
heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly.
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
stains the white radiance of eternity
until death shatters it to fragments.

Now, what’s beautiful in that? Is it heaven’s light that shines forever? Or is it rather the dome of many-colored glass that shatters? See, it’s always the image of change that really makes the poem.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
creeps on life’s petty pace from day to day.

Somehow, you know, the poet has got the intuition. The fact that things are always running out, that things are always disappearing, has some hidden marvel in it. The Japanese have a word, yūgen, which has no English equivalent whatsoever. Yūgen is, in a way, digging change. It’s described poetically: you have the feeling of yūgen when you see out in the distant water some ships hidden behind a far-off island. You have the feeling of yūgen when you watch wild geese suddenly seen and then lost in the clouds. You have the feeling of yūgen when you look across Mount Tamalpais, and you’ve never been to the other side, and you see the sky beyond. You don’t go over there to look and see what’s on the other side, that wouldn’t be yūgen. You let the other side be the other side—and it invokes something in your imagination, but you don’t attempt to define it to pin it down. Yūgen.

So in the same way, the coming and going of things in the world is marvelous. They go. Where do they go? Don’t answer, because that would spoil the mystery. They vanish into the mystery. But if you try to pursue them, you’ve destroyed yūgen. That’s a very curious thing, but that idea of yūgen—which, in Chinese characters, means, kind of ‘the deep mystery of the valley.’ There’s a poem in Chinese which says:

The wind drops,
but the petals keep falling.
The bird calls and the mountain
becomes more mysterious.

Isn’t that strange? There’s no wind anymore, and yet petals are dropping. And a bird in the canyon cries, and that one sound in the mountains brings out the silence with a wallop.

I remember when I was almost a child in the Pyrenees in the southwest of France. We went way up in this gorgeous silence of the mountains, but in the distance we could hear the bells on the cows clanking. And somehow those tiny sounds brought out the silence. And so, in the same way, slight permanences bring out change. And they give you this very strange sense. Yūgen: the mystery of change.

You know, in Eliot’s poem, The Four Quartets, where he says:

O dark dark dark.
They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers.
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark.

Life is life, you see, because—just because—it’s always disappearing. Supposing, suddenly, by some kind of diabolical magic, I could say, “Zzzzhip!” and every one of you would stay the same age forever. You’d be like Madame Tussauds waxworks. You’d be awful. In a thousand years from now, what beautiful hags you would be.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (12) - Peaks and Valleys Go Together

AW: So the trouble is that we have one-sided minds. And we notice the wave of life when it is at its peak or crest. We don’t notice it when it’s at the trough; not in the ordinary way. It’s the peaks that count. Take a buzzsaw: what seems important to us is the tips of the teeth. They seem to do the cutting, not the valleys between the teeth. But you couldn’t have tips of teeth without valleys between them. Therefore, the saw wouldn’t cut without both tips and V-shaped valleys. But we ignore that. We don’t notice the valleys, so much as we notice the mountains. Valleys point down. Mountains point up. And we prefer things that point up because up is good and down is bad.

We ignore the ‘valley’ aspect of things, and so all wisdom begins by emphasizing the valley aspect as distinct from the peak aspect. We pay plenty of attention to the peak aspect. That’s what captures our attention, but we somehow screen out the valley aspect. But that makes us very uncomfortable. It seems that we want and get pleasure from looking at the peaks, but actually, this denies our pleasure because secretly we know that every peak is followed by a valley. The valley of the shadow of death.

And we’re always afraid because we’re not used to looking at valleys; because we’re not used to living with them. They represent to us the strange and threatening unknown. And so we resist change, ignorant of the fact that change is life, and that ‘nothing’ is invariably the obverse face of ‘something.’

Most people are afraid of space. They ignore it, and they think space is nothing. Space and solid are two ways of talking about the same thing. Space-solid. You don’t find space without solid, you don’t find solids without space. If I say, “There is a universe in which there isn’t anything but space,” you must say, “Space between what?” Space is relationship, and it always goes together with solid, like back goes with front. But the divisive mind ignores space. And it thinks that it’s the solids that do the whole job; that they’re the only thing that’s real. That is, to put it in other words, conscious attention ignores intervals because it thinks they’re unimportant.

When you hear music, what you really hear when you hear melody is the interval between one tone and another. The steps on the scale. It’s the interval that is the important thing. So, in the same way, in the intervals between this year’s leaves, last year’s leaves; this generation of people and that generation; the interval is in some ways just as important—in some ways, more important—than what is between. Actually, they go together, but I say the interval is sometimes more important because we underemphasize it, so I’m going to overemphasize it as a correction. So space, night, death, darkness, not being there is an essential component of being there. You don’t have the one without the other, just as your buzzsaw has no teeth without having valleys between the tips of them. That’s the way being is made up.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (13) – Hinayana & Mahayana

AW: In Buddhism, change is emphasized. First, to unsettle people who think that they can achieve permanence by hanging on to life. And it seems that a preacher is wagging his finger at them and saying “Don’t cling to those things.” So then, as a result of that the follower of the way of Buddha seeks deliverance from attachment to the world of change. He seeks nirvāṇa, the state beyond change—which the Buddha called the unborn, the unoriginated, the uncreated, and the unformed. But then, you see, what he finds out is that, in seeking a state beyond change, seeking nirvāṇa as something away from saṃsāra—which is the name for the wheel—he is still seeking something permanent.

And so, as Buddhism went on, they thought about this a great deal. And this very point was the point of division between the two great schools of Buddhism—which, in the south, were Theravada, the doctrine of the Thera, the elders, sometimes known, disrespectfully, as the Hīnayāna. ‘Yana’ means a vehicle, a conveyance or a ferryboat. This is a yana. Then there is the other school of Buddhism, called the Mahāyāna. ‘Maha’ means great, ‘hina’ little. The great vehicle and the little vehicle.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (14) – Bodhisattvas

AW: The Mahāyānas say, “Your little vehicle just gets a few people who are very, very tough ascetics, and takes them across the other shore to nirvāṇa. But the great vehicle shows people that nirvāṇa is not different from ordinary life.” So that, when you have reached nirvāṇa, if you think, “Now I have attained it. Now I have succeeded. Now I have caught the secret of the universe, and I am at peace,” you have only a false peace; you have become a stone buddha. You have a new illusion of the changeless.

So it is said that such a person is a pratyekabuddha. That means private buddha: “I’ve got it all for myself.” And in contrast with this kind of pratyekabuddha, who gains nirvāṇa and stays there, the Mahāyānists use the word bodhisattva. ‘Sattva’ means essential principle; ‘bodhi,’ awakening. A person whose essential being is awakened. The word used to mean ‘junior buddha,’ someone on the way to becoming a buddha. But in the course of time, it came to mean someone who had attained buddhahood, who had reached nirvāṇa, but who returns into everyday life to deliver all other beings. This is the popular idea of a bodhisattva: a savior.

And so, in the popular Buddhism of Tibet and China and Japan, people worship the bodhisattvas—the great bodhisattvas—as saviors. Say, the hermaphroditic Guanyin. People loved Guanyin because he-she could be a buddha, but has come back into the world to save all beings. The Japanese call he-she Kannon, and they have, in Kyoto, an image of Kannon with one thousand arms radiating like a great aureole all around this great golden figure. And these one thousand arms are one thousand different ways of rescuing beings from ignorance. So they revere those bodhisattvas as the saviors who’ve come back into the world to deliver all beings.

But there is a more esoteric interpretation of this. The bodhisattva returns into the world. That means he has discovered that you don’t have to go anywhere to find nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa is where you are, provided you don’t object to it.

[Reefs]

The World as Emptiness (15) – Willing to Die

AW: Change—and everything is change; nothing can be held on to—to the degree that you go with a stream, you see, you are still, you are flowing with it. But to the degree you resist the stream, then you notice that the current is rushing past you and fighting with you. So swim with it, go with it, and you’re there. You’re at rest. And this is, of course, particularly true when it comes to those moments when life really seems to be going to take us away, and the stream of change is going to swallow us completely. The moment of death.

But actually, the whole problem is that there really is no other problem for human beings than to go over that waterfall when it comes. Just as you go over any other waterfall, just as you go on from day to day, just as you go to sleep at night. Be absolutely willing to die. Now, I’m not preaching. I’m not saying you ought to be willing to die, and that you should muscle up your courage and somehow put on a good front when the terrible thing comes. That’s not the idea at all. The point is that you can only die well if you understand this system of waves. If you understand that your disappearance as the form in which you think you are you—your disappearance as this particular organism—is simply seasonal. That you are just as much the dark space beyond death as you are the light interval called life. These are just two sides of you, because you is the total wave. You see, we can’t have half a wave. Nobody ever saw waves which just had crests and no troughs. So you can’t have half a human being, who is born but doesn’t die; half a thing. That would be only half a thing. But the propagation of vibrations—and life is vibration—it simply goes on an on, but its cycles are long cycles and short cycles.

So then, here’s the principle: when you don’t resist change—I mean over-resist; I don’t mean being flabby—when you don’t resist change, you see that the changing world, which disappears like smoke, is no different from the nirvāṇa world. Nirvāṇa, as I said, means breathe out, let go of the breath. So, in the same way, don’t resist change; it’s all the same principle.

So the bodhisattva saves all beings not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the very fact of not being able to stop changing. You can’t hang on to yourself. You don’t have to try to not hang on to yourself. It can’t be done. And that is salvation. Memento mori, be mindful of death.