Alan Watts ~ The Art Of Polar Thinking

at least a partial view of what this fantastic metaphysical construct is and if you want to incidentally explore it further the alas the literature is not too well available but there is an excellent account of it in the second volume of fungal ins history of Chinese philosophy and I think that's the best place to go there is a book that there are little book that Suzuki wrote called the essence of Buddhism published in London by the Buddhist society and that also is an account of it but it's harder to find so now how do we get from where we were to Zen well it goes like this in the Sutra of the 6th patriarch the ton Jing which was the collected teachings of the 6th patriarch of the Zen school who as I said was a contemporary a fat son and fat son died in 712 ad and a nun died in 713 in his discourse he gives a lesson on the art of teaching the art of being a guru and this lesson is based on getting people to be capable of polar thinking polar thinkin is simply well it's not just thinking it's a kind of feeling and a kind of sensing wherein you see the going together nurse of things that I have thought to be mutual are thought to be mutually exclusive opposites in other words you wouldn't know you were right unless somebody else was wrong normally we think then the right and the wrong are mutually exclusive but when you are capable of polar thinking you see that they go together a person who feels in a polar way sees figure and background going together he doesn't see them as mutually exclusive now then you see when I was explaining the Gigi muguet the fourth Dharma world or the fourth way of looking at the universe which is the culmination of the Kagan school I was trying to show this point that all events have a go witness with each other in the same way as a figure in a background so in order to get this point across way none explained that when a person asks you a question about something sacred you give him an answer in terms of something secular when he asks you about something eternal you give him an answer in terms of the temporal when he asks you about something abstract you give him an answer in terms of the concrete and so the whole way down the line so when you read your Zen stories which are always this apparently delightful nonsense somebody says what is the fundamental meaning of Buddhism and the answer is a dried dung scraper in Far East they don't you they use not to use toilet paper they had a stick they used instead and this is the answer you see he has switched completely from the domain of life that is considered philosophical and sacred to one that is considered completely unproven and unmentionable then on other occasions it's good goes the other way a monk says to the master and they're engaged in cooking they're peeling potatoes honey this has passed me the knife the master hands it to him blade first and the monk says please give me the other end the masters what would you do with the other end and this he immediately has a kind of metaphysical flavor to it so that he jumps you see from the practical question to the metaphysical but if you ask him the metaphysical he will always answer in terms of the everyday and the whole genius of Zen is really this that it has got a way of religious life and the form of iconography and the form of which is secular and it has created a whole school of poetry where the deep philosophical matters are never never mentioned except sometimes by way of making a joke because what Zen tries to do ideally is to be completely cool to create the religion of no religion so that you don't notice it's around unless you're in the know now this is not actually true in practice many people are disturbed when they go to Japan and they walk into zen temples and find that they have rituals and services such as i've just been playing to you that they have elaborate buddha images and people are making vows to them as a matter of fact when professor Houston Smith went to Japan and was being shown round a Zen monastery he noticed that his guide them the particular master of the monastery whenever he passed an image of the Buddha would stop and bow and he said to him I don't understand this he said because I thought you were Zen Buddhists would burn up these images and as you one of your masters did in one of the stories said I don't see why you bow II didn't like just as well spit up and the master said you spits eyebrows but you see the the the thing about all this is the about iconoclasm there are very different spirits of iconoclasm the Puritan iconoclasts who broke down all the images in the English churches hated the images they thought they were evil and wrong and so they smashed them ruthlessly but when a chicken comes out of the egg shell the egg shell is not something to be deplored it's certainly something to be broken but had the shell not existed the chicken wouldn't have been protected so in precisely the same way images religious ideas religious symbols exist in order to be constructively and lovingly broken because they are like opening a package if there's no package you know you can hardly get the contents has that follow through your fingers so if something comes to you in a package for packaging is so important and so interesting something comes to you in a package well it's like on Christmas Day here all these gorgeous packages with colours and gold and everything and very often the packages are much better than what's in them but you then or everybody proceeds to tear them apart and get what's inside so from this point of view the Zen Buddhists regard all ideas about Buddhism about philosophy about religion and so on has so much packaging and in order to get at it you have to get rid of the packaging so what happens then when we get to the state I was talking about this morning where you abandon completely all belief you abandon every sort of way of hanging on to life you accept your complete impermanence the prospect of your death of vanishing into nothing whatsoever you see and of not being able to control anything of being at the mercy of what is completely other than you and you let go to that you see in it this means that you even get rid of any any God whatsoever to do this fully you don't have a thing left to cling to so this complete let go flipz and you discover having made it a new way of experiencing all together in which you don't need any God because you're it but also you don't think to the idea that you're it in other words this is why Krishnamurti makes a certain kind of attack on people who are Vaden tests and who believed that the human self is ultimately the divine self he says why do you believe in that see because if you believe in it you are making it a thing to hang on to and so in a way then you see all belief in God is lack of faith that ever struck you you're still clinging and so long as you're still clinging you don't have faith because faith is the state of total let go so when through some marvelous desperation we get to the state of total let go and then you see if fantastically religion anything like religion simply disappears there's no need for it any longer it's like you've crossed the shore crossed to the other Shore you don't need the raft get off leave the raft behind now the other Shore is actually the same as this one you know when you cross the river when the mountain is in the distance see there's the other Shore over there it's kind of different from here you can sit here and say mmm be nice to live there wouldn't it see a place up there I just love to live because it looks so good from here but then you go and you buy that house and you sit there and it feels the same as this place feels because you're there and how things feel how you are and you look back across here and say gee isn't that look lovely there are mysterious trails going up Mount Tamalpais the look as if they led to that place that we were talking about this morning the secret garden which every child remembers and they disappear through trees and there's a kind of a mysterious little Canyon when you can hear the sound of a waterfall and you know somewhere in there is that garden I know as a matter of fact where it is there is one but always when you follow the road right through it leads back to San Rafael and its suburbs on the other side you see I have been years seeking the ideal place and I've come to the conclusion that it the only way I can possibly find it is to be it if you can find it in you then anywhere you go is the ideal place to live but it's so fascinating projecting it outside and going on a look for it I mean this is the hole of fun fun means so when therefore religion is abandoned you are in a dangerous fix because you can very easily slip into madness we were talking this morning about a vision Lloyd brought up this question about the vision of a fourth dimension or another dimension and anybody who looked at it went crazy and this is a real danger that people who have the mystical vision whether through practicing yoga or Zen Buddhism or has he cast Christian prayers or by taking LSD becomes a serious menace to society and society gets really worried about them because they have they they're not taking the world and its concerns seriously any longer they know it's an illusion and if you really know it's an illusion if you really know I'm an illusion I don't know what you're going to do with me I don't know whether I trust you I don't know whether you're going to keep the rules high I just don't know about you you've seen through it and goodness only knows you may do anything and if you're not sure of yourself and you suddenly see that all this is an illusion there's nothing you can cling to it's all relative now you may get bugged and you may go nuts that's the great danger in all of this and that is why as a Zen monastery is at one in the same moment a place of total iconoclasm of seeing through the whole thing and yet at the same time it maintains a discipline as clean and strict as anywhere you can find the combination of the two is simply marvelous unfortunately modern Japan doesn't dig it but you what they've done is to their they well recognized that you cannot go into outer space and come back to this world without strict controls it's exactly the same way when you're skin diving you go below a certain number of fathoms and you experience weightlessness now a person who's not properly trained at that level will get happy now there's no reason why you shouldn't get happy provided you keep your wits about you nothing matters at all when your weight vanishes because after all you don't matter anymore you have no weight nothing is weighty nothing is important and a person may at this point take off his oxygen mask and offer it to a fish in which case he'll drown he'll never come back and if he stays down too long he enjoys this too much his oxygen supply will run out and he'll be lost so he has a watch and he knows according to discipline that at a certain time on this instrument he's got to come up it's like when you're had too much to drink and you're driving you've got to watch your speedometer drive by instruments when you're in a difficult situation in an airplane and you've lost your sense of gravity what's your instrument don't trust your senses you see this is very important in Buddhist imagery there are guardians of the directions of the universe and they are all in the figure of Chinese generals with clubs and swords and very fierce expressions and they are always put at gates you know gates a north south east and west and here are the guards they guard the entrances but what they really got is the directions because it's absolutely important that we can agree on our timescale and on our north south east and west so that I can meet you if we can't agree about that we will miss each other completely we'll never meet and if we can't meet we can't have dinner together if we can't have dinner together we can't love each other so in the middle of nothingness which is all this space here see which is nothing whatever there are nevertheless directions and think what a beautiful thing that is you see to set up directions in the middle of nothing so for this reason in the religion where anything goes and anything is allowed and no holes are barred there is for that reason precisely a discipline and an order which is pretty strict but the spirit of the strictness is different than the spirit of strictness in theistic religions see in Buddhism there's no boss ultimate reality is not conceived in the form of authority because from their point of view that's childish you're your own boss and you're responsible if you want to belong to a society it's up to you if you want to conform in other words but one of the interesting things is you can always cease to be a monk without dishonor in the Christian Church you can't because you make life vows to get in you promise forever to be obedient chaste and poor and this this is irrevocable like Christian marriage but in the Buddhist order you can leave anytime you want and they say all right you you you've got many other lives ahead of you in which you can be a monk all over again and if you don't want to do it this round you don't have to and we're not so we're not mad at you just please if you don't want to undergo this discipline go somewhere else and there's no dishonor about that at all I have a friend in Los Angeles who runs a very fancy restaurant he was a Buddhist monk for 10 days it was quite an experience but that's all right ok you try it and if you want to stay here we're very happy to have you if you don't want him we just assumed you weren't around because you're not deceiving us you know if you stay then you don't really want to but feel you ought to you're a nuisance it's like a person who feels they ought to be unselfish and is therefore always making promises which they're never going to fulfill it's much better to be frank until people what you honestly feel then pretend so for this reason then where there is no religion at all because everybody's realized that the sky's the limit there isn't any boss there's nothing to kowtow to because you're it it follows that you become therefore responsible for creating an order instead of there but you see instead of submitting to the order you create it next you find that you can having got rid of religion completely well now everything becomes religious that is to say instead of having some kind of hang-up on universals on vast abstract huge area conceptions you employ instead things that are very particular very temporal because of GG Mogae you remember the the image that i use to illustrate GG mu gay was the net of jewels wherein every crystal reflects all the other crystals every dewdrop on the spider's web reflects all the others okay so then I just happen to pick up this because some happen to be handy I don't want you to think about fans and orient and what sort of thing but with this all Buddhism can be taught all the universe all Sciences all philosophy can be demonstrated with this because this is one of the jewels reflecting all the others when you pick up a link in a chain all the other links come up with it so with us and if you ask me about what is the mystery of life what is God and I show you this fan people look at you in a strange way and say umm I wonder what he meant by that well the truth of the matter is it didn't mean anything at all because this doesn't mean anything words mean something because they refer to events and things that are other than the sounds of the words but the things and events that words refer to don't refer to anything else of course they're connected with everything else but they don't refer to everything else in the same way as the symbol does so that's why Zen always answers in terms of the completely concrete what is this or fan happens to be a noise which this isn't this is what this is or alternatively if you don't want to be hung up on it that's this or this so in just the same way let's consider the advance that Zen makes in the world of art the saw the world of painting I showed you a Tibetan painting this morning which was extremely elaborate where every tiny space was filled and where all of it was obviously religious it was quite clear that this painting was an icon now then people don't like that kind of thing I mean it isn't that they have a real prejudice against it but they don't usually have it around instead they prefer a style of painting in which there's an enormous amount of untouched paper and where a brush has very swiftly and deftly painted some bamboo sort of in one corner now the way the bamboo is put on the paper Alive's all the rest of the paper because it turns it into a lake without drawing a single line a master can put bamboo on a piece of paper and turn the rest of the paper into a lake everybody can see the lake there although nothing has happened empty space or it might be a whole mountain might be there but covered in mist because you see he didn't use the paper as mere paper you often see around especially motels they have you know the kind of motel where you have flower prints over the bed and there's a bunch of flowers taken out of an old book of etchings or something you know putting a frame by some interior decorator they know there wasn't one two three four on the Sun a row and always the bunch of flowers is put bang in the middle of the piece of paper now you know what that does that D vitalizes all the rest of the paper because it means the background has become unimportant and this is always done by people who don't understand polar thinking who don't feel that figure and ground go together but all Zen painting where you get this extraordinary relationship or figure to background is done by people who feel and think you know ants actually sense in a polar way they see the space and the solid simultaneously and that's why the Chinese place things in space the way they do even you can't all see it from where you're sitting a piece of calligraphy hour contains in it an extremely important relationship between the characters and the space now it would take me quite a while to go into all the details of that but they have to be just the right size to accord with that space there isn't only one way of doing it there are several ways of putting the characters in a piece of paper that size but in each way that you use you take account of the space you don't use the paper as mere neutral background so when for example you will find so often with the Chinese painter takes his area his rectangular area in which he's painting and he will paint one corner and for say from the bottom left he will strike up a bamboo stalk and Flo leaves in the wind on it and so leave the rest this is a trick you see which uses and as I said the vital Isis the whole of the rest of the area and you don't do that simply by putting the figure slump in the center so the whole earth which has been inspired by zen is based on polar recognition of the identity of space and solid solid and space they see one implies the other but this is always so unexpected from the point of view of common sense people in other words think space is nothing and that it has no power and so for this very reason the architecture inspired by Zen is practically all of it playing with space Zen emphasizes the luxurious richness of poverty of rooms with practically nothing in them furniture lessness and it has a luxury that's unbelievable the uncluttered life although I must say that somewhere I went to the house of a very great tea master where everything was absolutely gorgeously in order oh it was the highest style Zen taste Japan they call it yamato damashii and we went into a little tea room and jano in a kind of experimental fiddling way pushed aside a screen and inside was a western-style room completely cluttered with papers and old clothes and everything thrown in there whoof you see because everybody needs an unconscious place you can somebody everybody everybody's house has a basement or a closet or something where they throw everything away that's just what I call the element of irreducible rascality is always there but nevertheless on the outside the place where you operate know they have this sense of complete clearness which is the coincidence in one art expression our freedom and discipline anything goes because you've got complete space in which you can do anything and yet the space is disciplined beautifully then in subject matter of painting then people of course as I said prefer the secular even when they paint Saints ages Buddha's and so on they give them a secular form that is to say they looked like just ordinary people they don't necessarily have halos or special markings they prefer that they shouldn't that they should look kind of rustic and they prefer to put on the altar as it were the the tokonoma of a tea room the alcove in other words is not almost never adorned with a religious figure but always with naturalistic painting rocks water vegetables trees whatever so in the same way in poetry where the haiku is a kind of masterpiece of this way of feeling the universe the hike who always celebrates a particular finite G type you know G is distinct from re instant of life in the dense mist what is being shouted between hill and boat and you from such a poem will remember you know some morning when you were at some gorgeous River estuary and you couldn't see anything and there's a conversation going on between someone is calling down to someone in the boat from the hill and you can't make out what it's all about any more than you can make out what's on the other side of the river and yet you know it is gorgeous somehow but the very fact that you can't see makes it all the better this is all there is the path comes to an end in the parsley this is called in Japanese you can Yug en we have no English word for UK and whatsoever but you hold Saiga trail ends never but with a certain implication that is to say as I was just trying to describe the place up in the mountain well somehow the trail disappears and there might be something beyond but the whole point is that you don't investigate too closely then you're the sort of person who when you gets in there would spoil it so I could say um when you make love to somebody do it delicately don't be too inquisitive don't be too probing because that would injure what you love but the real constant theme of the haiku is that it always in comics the specific finite temporal immediate moment and with this says more than you can say with any amount of abstract generalizations only only only only you always know but behind this the people who make up the Haiku are not bourgeois Philistines who say well isn't the main thing simply to be practical and get on with your work the point about the haiku is this it's something in human life which is very difficult to pin down but it's when somebody comes on at you and says something but you know that there's another meaning behind it which doesn't have to be stated between you and so you get a joke so you get a tacit understanding about something this looks like it's this but it is that our hike who does this in a very cunning way it's the simplest possible utterance basho said to get haiku well written ask a 3-foot child to say the robin's egg is blue you like the fire I'll show you something beautiful a great big ball of snow and this is a haiku but something is conveyed by this sea which we're not going to talk about it'd be bad form to begin with it's like gentlemen in England don't talk about religion or sex oh boy you don't mention these things it's not quite like that but it's nearly like that see there's something got over to you by this where the whole fun of the thing is that you don't mention it but this is possible only when you know the G G mu J thing that every bit of experience takes in everything else so in exactly the same way we have a Confraternity among us in our society today alpha hipsters and they can with a flick of an eyelash make a whole crowd of people laugh or in the no because they have seen that one single motion of an eye is the whole universe in operation and that joke is that the people outside don't know this but when I move an eyelash at you when you're in the know about this you laugh it's a very funny game you

Channel: Groundless Ground

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Keywords: Alan, Watts, The, Art, Of, Polar, Thinking

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Length: 47min 0sec (2820 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 04 2019