Alan Watts' Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 5: Zen Bones

be here now just be here now [Music] hello everyone and welcome to being in the way the alan watts podcast and i'm your host mark watts and today we're going to be listening to zen bones a remarkable public lecture that my father gave in 1967 at the avalon ballroom at a zenifit put on by the san francisco zen center to raise money to purchase tasahara a remote site where a zen center was built in the mountains east of big sur while in recent weeks we've been listening to mostly seminar material where my father would be in a workshop or a seminar with a small group of people in this talk we go to a big hall the avalon ballroom was usually the site of rock and roll performances they're on van ness and on this occasion he's accompanied by a group of buddhist monks who chant the tisarna and other buddhist chants also the chimes and gongs that surround meditation practice in zendo in coming weeks we're going to be hearing more of these big hall talks the talk that he did in 1971 in new york city at a conference called western therapy and eastern religions and then we're going to hear a talk that he did in san jose at san jose state on drugs turning the head or turning on so these are the next couple of podcasts coming up but today we have my father in zen bones a remarkable performance and part of our zen series at alanwats.org this podcast was made possible by a grant from the rizzuto foundation and is produced with the help of the ramdas podcast network our theme music is by zakir hussein courtesy of moment records and today also accompanied by the monks of the san francisco zen center in their chants and gongs so now here's alan watts in zen bones the order of proceedings for this evening is that we shall start with the chant called the t sarana and pancha sila in honor of the buddhism of southern asia the theravada and all those who know this particular chant are invited to join in after that there will be five minutes of zazen the art of sitting quietly without talking to yourself just digging reality when that is over suzuki roshi will lead in the chanting of the shingyo which is the heart sutra of mahayana buddhism the buddhism of north asia and everybody who knows that will also be invited to join in and then i shall say a few completely unnecessary words about zen bones [Music] [Music] oh [Music] yes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] once upon a time there was a zen student who quoted an old buddhist poem to his teacher which says the voices of torrance are from one great tongue the lines of the hills are the pure body of buddha isn't that right he said to the teacher it is said the teacher but it's a pity to say so it would be of course much better if this occasion were celebrated with no talk at all and if i addressed you in the manner of the ancient teachers of zen i should hit the microphone with my fan and leave but i somehow have the feeling that since you have contributed to um the support of the zen center in expectation of learning something a few words should be said even though i warn you that by explaining these things to you i shall subject you to a very serious hoax because if i allow you to leave here this evening under the impression that you understand something about zen you will have missed the point entirely because zen is a way of life a state of being that is not possible to embrace in any concept whatsoever so that any concepts any ideas any words that i shall put across to you this evening will have as their object showing you the limitations of words and of thinking now then if one must try to say something about what zen is and i want to do this by way of introduction i must make it emphatic that zen in its essence is not a doctrine there's nothing you're supposed to believe in and it's not a philosophy in our sense that is to say a set of ideas an intellectual net in which one tries to catch the fish of reality actually the fish of reality is more like water it always slips through the net and in water you know when you get into it there's nothing to hang on to all this universe is like water it is fluid it is transient it is changing and when you're thrown into the water after being accustomed to living on the dry land and you're not used to the idea of swimming you try to stand on the water you try to catch hold of it and as a result you drown the only way to survive in the water and this refers particularly to the waters of modern philosophical confusion where god is dead metaphysical propositions are meaningless and there's really nothing to hang on to because we're all just falling apart and the only thing to do under those circumstances is to learn how to swim and to swim you you relax you let go you give yourself to the water and you have to know how to breathe in the right way and then you find that the water holds you up indeed in a certain way you become the water and so in the same way one might say if one attempted to again i say misleadingly to put zen into any sort of concept it simply comes down to this that in this universe there is one great energy and we have no name for it people have tried various names for it like god like brahman like tao but in the west the word god has got so many funny associations attached to it that most of us are bored with it when people say god the father almighty most people feel funny inside and so we like to hear new words we'd like to hear about dao about brahman about shinyo and tathata and such strange names from the far east because they don't carry the same associations of mockish sanctimony and funny meanings from the past and actually some of these words that the buddhists use for the basic energy of the world really don't mean anything at all the word tathata which is translated in from the sanskrit into suchness or vastness or something like that uh really means something more like dadada based on the word which in sanskrit means that and so in sanskrit it is said that that thou art or in modern american urite but da da that's the first sound a baby makes when it comes into the world because the baby looks around and says that and fathers flatter themselves and think it's saying which means daddy but according to buddhist philosophy all this universe is one that means ten thousand functions or ten thousand things one suchness and we're all one suchness and that means that suchness comes and goes like everything else because this whole world is an on and off system as the chinese say it's the yang and the yin and therefore it consists of now you see it now you don't here you are here you are here you aren't because that's the very nature of energy to be like waves and waves have crests and troughs only we under being under a certain kind of sleepiness or illusion imagine that uh the trough is going to overcome the wave or the crest the yin the dark principle is going to overcome the yang or the light principle and that off is finally going to triumph over on and we shall i say bug ourselves by indulging in that illusion gee supposing darkness did win out wouldn't that be terrible and so we're constantly trembling and thinking that it may because after all isn't it odd that anything exists it's most peculiar it requires effort it requires energy and it would be so much easier for the to have been nothing at all therefore we think well since being since the is side of things is so much effort you always give up after a while and you sink back into death but death is just the other face of energy and it's the rest the not being anything around that produces something around just in the same way that you can't have solid without space or space without solid when you wake up to this and realize that the more it changes the more it's the same thing as the french say that you are really a playing of this one energy and there is nothing else but that that it is you but that for you to be always you would be an insufferable bore and therefore it is arranged that you stop being you after a while and then come back as someone else altogether and so when you find that out you become full of energy and delight as blake said energy is eternal delight and you suddenly see through the whole sham of things you realize you you're that we won't put a name on it you're that and you can't be anything else so you are relieved of fundamental terror that doesn't mean that you're always going to be a great hero that you won't jump when you hear it bang but you won't worry occasionally that you won't lose your temper it means though that fundamentally deep deep down within you you will be able to be human not a stone buddha you know in zen there is a difference made between a living buddha and a stone buddha if you go up to a stone buddha and you hit him hard on the head nothing happens you break the break your fist or your stick but if you hit a living buddha he may say ouch and he may feel uh pain because if he didn't feel something he wouldn't be a human being buddhas are human they are not devas they are not gods they are enlightened men and women but the point is that they are not afraid to be human they are not afraid to let themselves participate in the pains difficulties and struggles that naturally go with human existence the only difference is and it's almost an undetectable difference it takes one to no one as a zen poem says when two zen masters meet each other on the street they need no introduction when thieves meet they recognize one another instantly so a person who's a real cool zen understander does not go around saying oh i understand zen i have satori i have this attainment i have that attainment i have the other attainment because if he said that he wouldn't understand the first thing about it so it is then that uh if i may put it metaphorically juan said the perfect man employs his mind as a mirror it grasps nothing it refuses nothing it receives but does not keep and another poem says of wild geese flying over a lake the wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection and the water has no mind to retain their image in other words this is to be put very strictly into our modern idiom this is to live without hang-ups the word hang up being an almost exact translation of the japanese bonno and the sanskrit glacier ordinarily translated worldly attachment but all that sounds a little bit you know what i mean it sounds pious and in zen things that sound pious are said to stink of zen but to have no hang-up that is to say to be able to drift like a cloud and flow like water seeing that all life is a magnificent illusion a playing of energy and there is absolutely nothing fundamentally to be afraid of fundamentally you will be afraid on the surface you will be afraid of putting your hand in the fire you will be afraid of getting sick etc but you will not be afraid of fear fear will pass over your mind like a black cloud will be reflected in the mirror but of course the mirror isn't quite the right illustration space would be better like a black cloud flies through space without leaving any track like the stars don't leave trails behind them and so that fundamental that is called the void in buddhism it doesn't mean void in the sense that it's void in the ordinary sense of emptiness it means void in that it is the most real thing there is but nobody can conceive it it's rather the same situation that you get between the speaker in a radio and all the various sounds which it produces on the speaker you hear human voices you hear every kind of musical instrument honkings of horns the sound of traffic the explosion of guns and yet all that tremendous variety of sounds are the vibrations of one diaphragm but it never says so the announcer doesn't come on first thing in the morning and say ladies and gentlemen all the sounds that you will hear subsequently during the day will be the vibrations of this diaphragm but don't take them for real and the radio never mentions its own construction you see and in exactly the same way you are never able really to examine to make an object of your own mind just as you can't look directly into your own eyes or bite your own teeth because you are that and if you try to find it and make it something to possess why that's a great lack of confidence that shows you don't really know you're it and if you're it you don't need to make anything of it there's nothing to look for but the test is are you still looking do you know that i mean not as kind of knowledge that you possess not something you've learned in school like you've got a degree and you know i've mastered the contents of these books and remembered it in this knowledge there's nothing to be remembered nothing to be formulated you know it best when you say well i don't know it because that means i'm not holding on to it i'm not trying to cling to it in the form of a concept because there's absolutely no necessity to do so that would be in zen language putting legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch or as we would say gilding the lily now you say well that sounds pretty easy you mean to say all we have to do is just relax we don't go around uh chasing anything anymore we don't we abandon religion we abandon meditations we abandon this that and the other and just live it up anyhow just go on you know like a father says to a child who keeps asking why why why why why why did god make the universe who made god why are the trees green and so on and so forth the father says finally oh shut up and eat your bun [Music] it isn't quite like that because you see the thing is this all those people who try to realize then by doing nothing about it are still trying desperately to find it and are on the wrong track there is another zen poem which says you cannot attain it by not thinking by thinking you cannot attain it by thinking you cannot grasp it by not thinking or you could say you cannot catch hold of the meaning of zen by doing something about it but equally you cannot see into its meaning by doing nothing about it because both are in their different ways attempts to move from where you are now here to somewhere else and the point is that the we come to an understanding of this what i call suchness only through being completely here and no means are necessary to be completely here either active means on the one hand nor passive means on the other because in both ways you are trying to move away from the immediate now but you see it's difficult to understand language like that and to understand what all that is about there is really one absolutely necessary uh prerequisite and this is to stop thinking now i am not saying this in the spirit of being an anti-intellectual because i think a lot talk a lot write a lot of books and am a sort of half-baked scholar but you know if you talk all the time you'll never hear what anybody else has to say and therefore all you'll have to talk about is your own conversation the same is true for people who think all the time that means when i use the word think talking to yourself sub-vocal conversation the constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull now if you do that all the time you'll find that you've nothing to think about except thinking and just as you have to stop talking to hear what others have to say you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about the moment you stop thinking you become into immediate contact with what koziebski called so delightfully the unspeakable world that is to say the non-verbal world some people would call it the physical world but these words physical non-verbal material are all conceptual and is not a concept it's not a noise either it's get that so when you are awake to that world you suddenly find that all the so-called differences between self and other life and death pleasure and pain are all conceptual and they're not there they don't exist at all in that world which is in other words if i hit you hard enough ouch doesn't hurt if you're in a state of what is called no thought it just there is a certain experience you see but you don't call it hurt it's like when you were small children they banged you about and you cried and they said don't cry because they wanted to make you hurt and not cry at the same time people are rather curious about the things they do like that because then when you saw people die and everybody around you started weeping and making a fuss and then you learned from that that dying was terrible when somebody got sick everybody else got anxious and you learned that getting sick was something awful you learned it from the concept so the reason why there is in in the practice of zen what we did before this lecture began to practice zazen sitting zen incidentally there are three other kinds of zen besides zazen standing zen walking zen and lying zen in buddhism they speak of the three dignities of man walking standing sitting and lying and when they say when you sit just sit when you walk just walk but whatever you do don't wobble in fact of course you can wobble if you really wobble well when the old master hyakujou was asked what is zen he said when hungry eat when tired sleep but they said well isn't that what everybody does aren't you just like ordinary people oh he said no they don't do anything of the kind when they're hungry they don't just eat they think of all sorts of things when they're tired they don't just sleep but dream all sorts of dreams i know the jungians won't like that but uh there comes a time when you just dream yourself out and uh no more dreams you sleep deeply and breathe from your heels now therefore zazen or sitting zen is a very very good thing in the western world we have been running around far too much it's all right we've been active and our action has achieved a lot of good things but as aristotle pointed out long ago and this is one of the good things about aristotle and he said the goal of action is contemplation in other words busy busy busy busy busy but what's it all about especially when people are busy because they think they're going somewhere and they're going to get something and attain something there's quite a good deal of point to action if you know you're not going anywhere if you act like you dance or like you sing or play music then you're not going anywhere you're just doing pure action but if you act with the thought in mind that as a result of action you are eventually going to arrive at some place where everything will be all right then you are on a squirrel cage hopelessly condemned to what the buddhists call samsara the round or rat race of birth and death because you think you're going to get someone you're already there and it's only a person who has discovered that he's already there who is capable of action because he doesn't act frantically with the thought that he's going to get somewhere he acts like uh he can go into walking meditation at that point you see where we walk not because we are in a great great hurry to get to a destination but because the walking itself is great the walking itself is the meditation and when you watch zen monk's walk it's very fascinating they have a different kind of walk from everybody else in japan most japanese shuffle along or if they wear western clothes they race and hurry like we do zen monks have a peculiar swing when they walk and uh you have the feeling um they walk rather the same way as a cat uh there's something about it which isn't hesitant they're going along all right they're not sort of vague around but um they're walking just to walk and that's walking meditation but the point is that one cannot act creatively except on the basis of stillness of having a mind that is from time to time capable of stopping thinking and so this practice of sitting and may seem very difficult at first because if you sit in the buddhist way uh it makes your legs ache and uh most westerners start to fidget they find it very boring to sit for a long time but the reason they find it boring is that they're still thinking if you weren't thinking you wouldn't notice the passage of time and as a matter of fact far from being boring the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly interesting the most ordinary sights and sounds and smells the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you all these things without being named and saying that's a shadow that's red that's brown that's somebody's foot when you don't name things any longer you start seeing them because say when a person says i see a leaf immediately one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing outlined in black and filled in with flat green no leaf looks like that no leaves leaves are not green that's why laozi said the five colors make a man blind the five tones make a man deaf because if you can only see five colors you're blind and if you can only hear five tones in music you're deaf you see if you if you force sound into five tones you force color into five colors you're blind and deaf the the world of color is infinite as is the world of sound and it is only through stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and sound that you really begin to hear it and see it so this uh shall i be so bold as to use the word discipline of meditation or zazen lies behind the extraordinary capacity of zen people to develop such great arts as the gardens the tea ceremony the calligraphy and the grand painting of the song dynasty and of the japanese sumi tradition and it was because especially in tea ceremony which means literally channel you in japanese means hot water of tea they found in the very simplest things of everyday life magic in the words of the poet hokoji marvelous power and supernatural activity drawing water carrying wood and you know how it is sometimes when you say a word and make the word meaningless you take the word yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes it becomes funny that's why they use mu you know in zen training which means no and you you get this going for a long time the word ceases to mean anything and it becomes magical that sound now what you have to realize in the further continuance of zazen that as you uh well let me say first in a preliminary way the easiest way to stop thinking is first of all to think about something that doesn't have any meaning that's my point in talking about mu or yes or counting your breath or listening to a sound that has no meaning because that stops you thinking because you become fascinated in the sound then as you get on and you just the sound only uh comes a point when the sound is taken away and you're wide open now at that point there will be a kind of preliminary so-called satori and you will think wow that's it you'll be so happy you'll be walking on air when suzuki daisets was asked what is it like to have satori he said well it's like ordinary everyday experience except about two inches off the ground but there's another saying that that student who has attained satori goes to hell as straight as an arrow no satori around here because anybody who has a spiritual experience whether you get it through zazen or through lsd or anything you know that gives you that experience if you hold on to it say now i've got it it's gone out of the window because the minute you grab the living thing it's like catching a handful of water the harder you clutch the faster it squirts through your fingers there's nothing to get hold of because you don't need to get hold of anything you had it from the beginning because you can see that by various methods of meditation but the trouble is the people who come out of that and brag about it say i've seen it equally intolerable the people who study zen and come out and brag to their friends about how much their legs hurt and how long they sat and what an awful thing it was their sickening because the the disciplined side of this thing is not meant to be something awful it's not done in a masochistic spirit or a sadistic spirit suffering bill's character therefore suffering is good for you when i went to school in england the basic premise of education was that suffering builds character and therefore all senior boys were at liberty to bang about the junior ones with a perfectly clear conscience because they were doing them a favor it was good for them it was building their character and as a result of this kind of attitude the word discipline has begun to stink it's been stinking for a long time but we need a kind of entirely new attitude towards this because without that quiet and that non-striving the life becomes messy when you let go finally because there's nothing to hold on to you have to be awfully careful not to turn into loose yogurt let me give two opposite illustrations when you ask most people to lie flat on the floor and relax you find that they are full of tensions because they don't really believe that the floor will hold them up and therefore they are holding themselves together they're uptight they're afraid that if they don't do this even though the floor is supporting them they'll suddenly turn into a gelatinous mass and trickle away in all directions then there are other people when you tell them to relax they go like a limp rag but you see the human organism is a subtle combination of hardness and softness our flesh and bones and the side of zen which has to do with neither doing nor not doing but knowing that you are it anyway and you don't have to seek it that's then flesh but the side in which you can come back into the world with this attitude of not seeking and knowing your it and not fall apart that requires bones and one of the most difficult things this is belongs to of course a generation we all know about that was running around some time ago where they caught on to zen and they started anything goes painting they started anything goes sculpture they started anything goes way of life now i think we're recovering from that today at any rate our painters are beginning once again to return to glory to marvelous articulateness and vivid color nothing like it has been seen since the stained glass of shards that's a good sign but it requires that [Music] there be in our daily use of freedom and i'm not just talking about political freedom i'm talking about the freedom which comes when you know that you are writ forever and ever and ever and it'll be so nice when you die because that'll be a change but it'll come back some other way and when you know that and you've seen through the whole mirage then watch out because there may still be in you some seeds of hostility some seeds of pride some seeds of um wanting to put down other people or wanting just to defy uh the normal arrangements of life so that is why in the order of a zen monastery various duties are assigned the novices have the light duties and the more senior you get the heavy duties for example the roshi very often is the one who cleans out the banjo the toilet and everything is kept in order there is a kind of beautiful almost princely asceticism because by reason of that order being kept all the time the vast free energy which is contained in the system doesn't run amok the understanding of zen the understanding of awakening the understanding of well we'll call it mystical experience is one of the most dangerous things in the world and for a person who cannot contain it it's like putting a million volts through your electric shaver you blow your mind and it stays blown now if you go off in that way that is what would be called in buddhism apache buddha private buddha he's one who goes off into the transcendental world and is never seen again and he's made a mistake from the standpoint of buddhism because from the standpoint of buddhism there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world the bodhisattva you see who doesn't go off into a nirvana and stay there forever and ever but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it too he he doesn't come back because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious can't he comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same he sees all other beings as buddhas he sees them to use the phrase of gk chesterton's but now a great thing in the street seems any human nod where move in strange democracy the million masks of god and it's fantastic to look at people and see that they really uh deep down are enlightened they're it they're they're faces of the divine and they look at you and say oh no but i'm not divine i'm just ordinary little me and you look at them in a funny way and here you see uh the buddha nature looking out of their eyes straight at you and saying it's not and saying it quite sincerely and that's why when you get up against a great guru be zen master or whatever he has a funny look in his eyes when you say i have a problem guru i really i'm mixed up and i don't understand he looks at you in this queer way and you think oh dear me he's reading my most secret thoughts he's seeing all the awful things i am all my cowardice all my shortcomings he's not doing anything of the kind he's not even interested in such things he's looking at if i may use hindu terminology he's looking at shiva in you saying my god shiva won't you come off it [Music] so then you see the bodhisattva who is uh if i i'm assuming quite a knowledge of buddhism in this assembly about the bodhisattva as distinct from the pratyaga buddha bodhisattva doesn't go off into nirvana he doesn't go off into permanent um withdrawn ecstasy he doesn't go into a kind of catatonic samadhi that's all right there are people who can do that that's their vocation that's their specialty just as a long thing is the long body of buddha and the short thing is the short body of buddha but if you really understand that zen that buddhist idea of enlightenment is not comprehended in the idea of the transcendental neither is it comprehended in the idea of the ordinary not in terms of the infinite not in terms of the finite not in terms of the eternal not in terms of the temporal because they're all concepts so let me say again i'm not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and methodical way as being school teacher-ish and saying nice if you were nice people that's what you would do for heaven's sake don't be nice people but the thing is that unless you do have that basic framework of a certain kind of order and a certain kind of discipline the force of liberation will blow the world to pieces it's too strong a current for the wire so then it's terribly important to see beyond ecstasy ecstasy yeah is the soft and lovely flesh huggable and kissable and that's very good but beyond ecstasy are bones what we call hard facts hard facts of everyday life incidentally we shouldn't forget to mention the soft facts there are many of them but in the hard fact it is say what we mean the world has seen in an ordinary everyday state of consciousness to find out that that is really no different from the world of supreme ecstasy well it's rather like this let's suppose as so often happens you think of ecstasy as insight as seeing light there's a zen poem which says a sudden crash of thunder the mind doors burst open and there sits the ordinary old man see there's a sudden vision satori breaking wowie and the doors of the mind are blown apart unless it's the ordinary old man that's just little little you you know lightning flashes sparks shower in one blink of your eyes you've missed seeing why because here is the light the light the light the light every mystic in the world has seen the light that brilliant blazing energy brighter than a thousand suns which is locked up in everything now imagine this imagine you're seeing it like uh you see orioles around buddhas like you see the beatific vision at the end of dante's paradiso vivid vivid light so bright that it's like the clear light of the void in the tibetan book of the dead it's beyond light it's so bright and you watch it receding from you and on the edges like a great star that becomes a rim of red and beyond that a rim of orange yellow green blue indigo violet you see this great mandala appearing this great sun and beyond the violet there's black black like obsidian not flat black but transparent black like lacquer and again blazing out of the black as the yang comes from the inn more light going going going and along with this light there comes sound there's a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can't hear it so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears but then along with the colors the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals down down down down until it gets to a deep thundering base which is so vibrant that in turn it turns into something solid and you begin to get a similar spectrum of textures now all this time you've been watching a kind of a thing radiating out but it says you know this isn't all i can do and the rays start going dancing like this and naturally the sound starts going waving too as it comes out and then the textures start varying themselves and they say well you've been looking at this thing as i've been describing it so far in a flat dimension uh let's add a third dimension it's going to come right at you now see this way and meanwhile it says it's not just that we're going to go ue ue like this we're going to do little curlicues we're going to go like this and he says well that's uh just the beginning we can go making squares and turns and then suddenly you see in all the little details have become so intense that all kinds of little subfigures are contained within what you thought were originally the main figures and the sound starts going all different amazing complexities of sound all over the place and this thing's going going going and you think you're going to go out of your mind and suddenly it turns into why us sitting around here you very much [Music] is [Music] [Music] oh [Music] them [Music] [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you've been listening to alan watts from zen bones an amazing recording made in 1967 at the zenifit to help raise money for tosahara at the avalon ballroom in san francisco our theme music is by zakir hussein and rhythm experience today accompanied by various monks from the zen center and in future episodes we will hear a gregorian choir and other accompaniments of a rather unusual nature today's podcast was made possible by a grant from the rizzuto foundation and is produced and distributed by the ram das be here now podcast network our theme music is by zakir hussein today mixed with some of the chanting monks from the zen center and for further information about the spoken works of the late alan watts please visit our website at alanwatts.org thank you so much [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

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Length: 57min 2sec (3422 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021