We'll repeat the address later. Now, part two of the seminar, Solid Emptiness. I was explaining that Mahayana Buddhism was India's principal export to the civilization of Asia, and that, quite basically, it's an attitude to life based on complete non-fear, or you could call it not clinging to things. It's based on the realization that you are not just your organism, your physical body,

[01:09]

or your own particularized psyche, but that you, even if you don't know it consciously, just as you don't know consciously how to grow your hair, you are fundamental reality, which is beyond any limitation of time or space. You're it. You're what there is. The Hindus have a symbol for this thing that they call the Brahman, or the Atman, the Self. The Buddhists simply modify this by saying, if you have a symbol of it, which is something you believe in, as one might say, believe in God, or believe in heaven, or life after death, or in an immortal soul, the fact that you believe is still an act of attachment or clinging, which is unnecessary. And so an unnecessary thing is what we would call yielding the lily, or they use a wonderful

[02:17]

phrase in Zen Buddhism, putting legs on the snake. Now legs embarrass the snake. It needs no legs. And guilt kills the lily. So the Buddhists have worked out a religion of no religion, that is to say, of not believing in anything at all, not because they believe that reality is nothingness, but because believing is unnecessary. It's yielding the lily. So this was the fundamental idea of this morning's lecture. Now, I want to go on this afternoon to put some of this in a kind of systematic and historical perspective, so that you all know where we are in time and space, and what all this is about, and how it came to be. Though the funny thing is that the Indians have no sense of history whatsoever.

[03:25]

This is one of the fundamental gripes of Western scholars, that when they read all the documents of Indian literature, there is no historical consciousness running in it. And so you don't know what period it comes from. To begin with, they didn't start writing anything down until about two centuries B.C., maybe a little before. Prior to that, everything was transmitted orally. And nobody has the faintest idea how far back it goes. The average educated guess today is that the Upanishads go back to about 800 B.C. They are the poems which represent the standpoint of Vedanta. Vedanta means anta, almost our word end or completion, of Veda.

[04:29]

Veda is our word video, videre, to see. Vid is knowledge. And so the most ancient scriptures of India are called Veda, or vision, you see. And they are poems in a mythological form. And the Upanishads constitute Veda-anta, that is to say the completion of the vision. And they tell you the secret, the inner meaning that underlies the mythology. So let us assume that the most educated guess of scholars today is that the texts called the Vedas are about 1500 B.C. And the texts called Upanishad run from approximately 800 to considerably later. 800 to at least 100, and some even later than that.

[05:32]

But the major Upanishads, such as the Brihadaranyaka, the Kena Upanishad, the Isha Upanishad, the Mandukya Upanishad, all those are relatively early. So they will be anywhere from 800 to 600 prior to the time of the Buddha. But still, you see, we are very vague about when all this started. Because the Vedic tradition was brought to India from somewhere in Central Asia. The Aryans who constitute the castes, the ruling people of India, and have done so for hundreds and hundreds of years, came from somewhere to the north, and have a common ancestry, linguistically, with our European languages.

[06:36]

But they had no sense of history. If you write a story about a certain king who was involved with a certain sage, you alter the name of the king. Every time you retell the story, you simply make him the king at the present time, because then it becomes relevant. So nobody knows. The Jews, on the other hand, had a sense of history, and were very particular about when and where and what happened. So it's far easier to make clear dates about the Old Testament and compare them with archaeological remains than it is with anything from India. Especially, India is a tropical country where everything decays very quickly. It is a kind of swarming, lively, slimy turnover of life.

[07:45]

So no one can be sure when all this started. So to even give Buddhism, being a relatively late phenomenon, out of Indian culture, the dates are a little bit more certain than they are with Hinduism. So we know that Gautama the Buddha lived shortly after 600 B.C. But we are very, very uncertain as to what he taught. There are two great sections of Buddhist scriptures. One is written in the Pali language and the other in Sanskrit, although most of the Sanskrit texts no longer exist and have to be studied in either Tibetan or Chinese translations.

[08:47]

Western scholars are largely of the opinion that the Pali books represent more definitely the authentic teaching of the Buddha than the Sanskrit ones. Although there's room for debate on this still. Pali is a sort of colloquial South Indian form of Sanskrit. For example, if you say nirvana in Sanskrit, you say nibbana in Pali. If you say karma in Sanskrit, you say kama in Pali. It's softened. So all Southern Buddhists, Theravadins, Iliyanists, make the Pali texts their authority. And the earliest Pali texts that we have are written on strips of palm leaf, like this,

[09:55]

just about so long, with characters that look like almost all of them are indistinguishable from the figure eight unless you look very closely. And they have holes in the middle of the leaf so they can be strung together and set between two boards of wood. Well now, when you look at this record of the Buddha's teachings, you raise questions. Because no human being sitting around in conversation with other people could ever have spoken in this way. It simply is not natural conversation. What it is, is a highly tabulated form of instruction, tabulated in order to be memorized. So it's easy to remember things if you classify them under 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Buddhism is all numbers. There are three characteristics of being.

[10:57]

Dukkha, suffering. Anitya, impermanence. Anatman, no self. There are four steps. There are four Noble Truths. There are eight stages of the Noble Eightfold Path. There are ten fetters. There are twelve elements of the chain of dependent origination. Everything is numbered. And this, therefore, takes us back to a time before writing, when everything had to be committed to memory. Now, it is conceivable that if I were going to talk to you, and I were going to examine you later, to be sure that you'd understood everything I said, that I would number my remarks and say, now you've got to remember first this, second that, third that. And I would talk back to you and say, what was the first thing? What was the second thing?

[12:00]

What was the third thing? But the style of those Pali scriptures is so artificial, and everything is repeated again and again and again, so that it's quite obvious to me. Something that monks did and put together on a wet afternoon with nothing better to do, it is terribly boring, and I simply don't advise anybody except a serious scholar who wants to comb it all out and get the results, ever to bother reading the Pali scriptures. The advantage of the Christians, you see, is they have this inimitably beautiful English Bible, translated under the reign of King James, and it is so exquisitely done, and the Jews were great poets, and it is very readable. Pali scriptures are boring to the extreme. There is exceptions.

[13:02]

So, there is this body of Pali literature which is called Tipitaka. Tipitaka means three baskets, because the Pali manuscripts were stored in baskets, and three big baskets constitute the tradition of Hinayana or Theravada Buddhism. In addition to this, there is the Mahayana canon or body of scriptures, which is one of the single biggest bodies of literature in the world. It is somewhat larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the official edition existing today is called Taisho Daizokyo, which is a Japanese edition of the Chinese texts, and the other is called the Tangyur, which is the Tibetan edition, but that's not too

[14:06]

easily come by. But the standard edition of the Taisho Daizokyo is a great, vast collection of volumes, all in Chinese, translating the Sanskrit scriptures. Now, again, the general opinion of scholars is that the Mahayana sutras are from a later time than the Buddha, ranging, the important texts in this collection range in origin from 100 B.C. approximately to about 400 A.D. And so, according to the standards of Western scholarship, these are forgeries. They are attributed to the Buddha, but actually composed by individuals living a lot later. Now, our morals, our literary morals, would say this was forgery and that has a bad intent,

[15:14]

but this is a modern idea. If we go back to Western scriptures, for example, we'll see a book in the Apocrypha called the Wisdom of Solomon. The Song of Songs, attributed to Solomon. The Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, attributed to Solomon. It is absolutely inconceivable that Solomon wrote these books. The Book of Deuteronomy is attributed to Moses. It is absolutely impossible that Moses wrote the Book of Deuteronomy. But why is it attributed to Moses? Because the actual writer of this book was too modest to give it his own name. And he would therefore say, I feel that I have been into a center of my consciousness that is beyond me. And I am reporting things from a level of my being which I cannot claim as my own.

[16:18]

Therefore, I have to ascribe the authorship to a person who is archetypal. Solomon represents wisdom. So, certain Hebrew writers of a certain period of history, when they felt that they were in touch with real wisdom, would feel it immoral to say, I, Ishmael Ben Ezra, will put this forth in my own name. On the contrary, that would be very immodest. I say, this is a revelation from Solomon. This, in those days, before copyright, you know, was considered the ethical thing to do. So, in exactly the same way, when Indian Buddhists, living long after the Buddha, living, say, in the university of Nalanda, around the beginning of the Christian era, or later,

[17:22]

no, Nalanda is later than that, Nalanda takes us to 200 A.D., specifically to a man called Nagarjuna, who lived about 200 A.D., who was the brilliant genius of the whole Mahayana movement. We don't know whether Nagarjuna wrote the scriptures he commented on, or only wrote the commentaries. But there's a huge body of literature, in Sanskrit, and it's known to us mainly through its Tibetan and Chinese translations, called Prajna Paramita. Prajna, as I explained to you, means intuitive wisdom. Paramita, for going across, that is to say, to the other shore. Wisdom for crossing to the other shore. And almost all of this literature has been translated into English by Edward Comsey. And you could get it in his, you can get selections from it in this book,

[18:26]

which is now available in paperback, in the Harper Torchbook series, Buddhist Texts Through the Ages. For the average person who does not want to be a specialist scholar, but wants to get a good idea of what all this is about, this is it. This has excellent selections from all types of Buddhist literature, especially this class. And it is conceivable that Nagarjuna wrote the scriptures in the name of the Buddha. And others did too. But they were simply, by their standards, too modest to say, this is mine. They are saying it comes from a deeper level of consciousness than my ego, and therefore is the Buddha's. Now, you see, in our morals, that's forgery.

[19:30]

In their morals, it's not. So, in Buddhism, you don't have the same problem that you have in Christianity. In Christianity, we want to know what were the Ipsissima Verba, the very words of Jesus, and what was a late addition. Because the authority is so peculiarly involved in the historical Jesus. In Buddhism, this is not the case. The Buddhists in general feel that Buddhism is like a tree. Buddha planted the seed, and later the tree grows. Very definitely. You see, in Christianity, Jesus is the only incarnation of God. The Christians, Orthodox Christians, will on the whole argue there will never be, there was never, another incarnation of God.

[20:34]

But in Buddhism, it is of the essence of the thing that Buddhas can appear in the world again and again and again. Any one of you can become a Buddha. So, there isn't this fastening of authority to a particular historical time and place. So then, the Buddhist scriptures represent, although they are all attributed to the Buddha, they represent an uncovering of questions which the Buddha raised. Now, for this purpose, it's important to understand one thing that is not made clear in almost all the books on Buddhism that I've ever read. Buddhism is absolutely fundamentally a dialogue.

[21:40]

And this dialogue, which is an interchange between a teacher and an inquirer, as with the teachings of Socrates, is quite different from an authoritative pronouncement. There are no teachings of Buddhism. Everything you will find stated as a teaching of Buddhism is actually a question, not a teaching. Let's go to a very fundamental point. Buddhism deals with the problem of suffering. Because, after all, suffering is the problem. That's what we mean by the whole idea of the problem. I suffer. I have a problem. So, if you don't like suffering, you say, How do I not suffer? And you go to a wild guy and say, I'm in pain. I'm anxious. I'm afraid. I'm this, that and the other.

[22:48]

How do I not do it? So, the Buddha answers to this question, You suffer because you desire. If you didn't desire, your desires would never be frustrated, and so you wouldn't suffer. So, what would happen if you didn't desire? Now, this is not a teaching. It is not saying, You ought not to desire. It is a request for making an experiment. Could you possibly not desire? So, the inquirer goes away and he makes this experiment. He sees, can I possibly get rid of my desires? And he discovers in the course of making this experiment that he is desiring to get rid of his desire. And so, he returns to the teacher and says,

[23:50]

It is impossible not to desire. Because, in trying not to desire, I'm desiring. And the teacher says, You're getting warmer. Laughter You see, in every respect, everything that the Buddha ever suggested that his followers should do was by nature of an experiment. Buddhism never uttered its final teaching. What it was actually after, all it describes are various experiments you can make to get on the road to it. So, it is of the nature of it that it is a dialogue. Indeed, many of the books of the Pali scriptures are called dialogues of the Buddha. So, this is very, very important to understand.

[24:54]

All these records and scriptures are interchanges. One of the first things, for example, that when I was starting to study Buddhism in my teens, I met a wonderful Japanese Sanskrit professor. And he explained to me, Buddha taught three signs of being. Dukkha, that the world as we live it is suffering. Anitya, impermanent. Anatman, without self. And he said, Buddha teach dukkha, to contradict wrong view, dukkha. Buddha teach anitya, to contradict wrong view, nitya. The whole idea, you see, is that you don't, you can't say what the truth is.

[25:58]

So, there is no dogma. All you do is you get going a dialogue, the effect of which is to counterbalance people's wrong view, or partial view. All Buddhism is view, the way you look at it. See? So, the first step of the Noble Eightfold Path is called Samyak Drishti, which means Samyak, perfect. Our word Sam, summation, comes eventually from the Sanskrit Samyak, perfect view. There is a wonderful story about Suzuki, Suzuki, was giving a course on Buddhism at the University of Hawaii, and he was going through the four Noble Truths, and he got the fourth one. And he was sort of lazing around on a hot afternoon with a group of students, half asleep, as he is often as an old man,

[27:03]

and he said, first step of Noble Eightfold Path is sure can mean right view, complete view. All Buddhism is view. You have right view, you have all Buddhism. Right view is no special view. Second step of Noble Eightfold Path, I forget second step, you look it up in a book. So, I told this story to Morimoto Roshi in Kyoto, and he said, first step of Noble Eightfold Path, in Japanese, shou ken, shou means correct, ken means view. He said, his... Laughter

[28:08]

So, what you have to understand then is simply that you can't look up the teachings of Buddhism in the same way that you can look up the teachings of Hegel, Kant, Spinoza, Jesus Christ, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and so on. They don't exist, they've never been written down. All that has been written down is the dialogue that leads up to the understanding. Somebody raised the question in this morning's discussion about whether you needed other people. It was you today. And, in a way you do, because this is the need of the guru. Now, the guru is not necessarily somebody who is a qualified master. The guru is something against which you bounce. It may be a book, it may be your own reflection in the mirror, said I to myself, said I.

[29:18]

But, this dialogue is the way in Buddhism. You've been listening to Alan Watts with part two from the seminar Solid Emptiness. Would you like a cassette copy of this? We don't know what we think. Well, that gives people the heebie-jeebies. They can't stand to be that insecure. Therefore, at this time, you see, when everything is under question, certain types of people rush for security. Let's have back firm dogmas. Tell us what to believe. And so, people go in for believing in the... You see, the Roman Catholic Church up to the time of Pope John was getting...

[30:21]

The height of it was Pacelli, Pius XI. They were getting more and more obscurantist. The last thing they did was to make it a dogma that the Virgin Mary zoomed up bodily into heaven. Literally. Because they were working on the theory that the success of the Church is in becoming as obscurantist as possible. Don't give an inch. This is the attitude of Cardinal Ottaviani. Don't give an inch to modernism, liberalism, free-thinkingism, scientism, anything. Stick to the old dogma. Because if you will believe that, it shows that you're tough-minded. You don't have any trouble with vagueness. With watering down the gospel. See? Look how you can use all this terminology. Watering it down. So that if you believe it that literal way,

[31:23]

you can pat yourself on the back and say I am a strong fellow, I'm gutsy. But the old wise Pope John, you know, suddenly realized that this wasn't working. And that some very serious thinking had to be done about the Church's whole position. And they now, because of Pope John, they put themselves out on a limb. And there's something that's got to happen. About birth control, about relationship to not only other Christian denominations but to other religions. Everybody's expecting it. And if they don't come through, the Church is going to lose face very badly. So, I'm proposing a few ideas that will help them to achieve this. Now, The difficulty is, you see, for Christians, that they like to emphasize

[32:29]

the importance of distinctions. And they always criticize Hindus because Hindus says everything is ultimately one. That's not exactly what it is. That's not what Hindus say. They say something a good bit more subtle than that. They say it's non-dual. But, if I may, I said I was going to tell fairy tales, so I'm going to keep the simple language. We're not going into philosophical subtleties. Let's just say for the sake of argument, the Hindus do say that everything is ultimately one. Everything is finally the self of the universe, the Godhead, the Brahman. And, the Christians say about that, that's a very dangerous thing, a very bad attitude. Because the Christians would say, if everything is one, then that destroys all values. It means that the good is the same as the evil, ultimately.

[33:32]

That it will all come out in the wash. That the villain is just as good as the hero. That disease is really the same thing as health. That crime is the same as virtue. And that there is really, the distinctions between values, better or worse, or between people, thou and I, aren't really important. Because in the end, we all end up realizing we're the same. Now, it's true. There is a very great value in distinctions. When they said, you know, that after all there isn't really very much difference between women and men, somebody says, Vive la critique des romance. Because, that's the joy of women and men being different.

[34:33]

And so, as one Hindu poet even said, Ram Prasad, he said, I love sugar, but I therefore don't want to become sugar. So, differences are important. But there is a tendency in Christianity to think that differences are not important unless they are absolute differences. And here, Christianity becomes a little bit skitsy. Because, they are saying that things are not important, distinctions in particular, are not important unless they go on forever. Now, that's absurd. When you go to a concert and you listen to a master musician, do you want the concert to go on forever? Obviously not. One hour of hi-hats is great.

[35:39]

Ten years of hi-hats without stop might be a little difficult. The thing is that a song, it's important that it doesn't last forever. Just as it's frightfully important that you, my dear friends, are not infinitely tall or infinitely broad. If you were, I couldn't see you. There'd be no room for me. Or if I were infinitely long, you know, where would you be? You wouldn't even know I was here, but you couldn't see the ends of me. Like, you know, the woman married a very tall man and they sued him for divorce for desertion. So, in this way then, it is ridiculous to insist too much upon differences. The thing about differences is that good differences,

[36:43]

interesting differences, all depend on a basic unity. Even battles, even where we are going to fight to the death about whether you're right or I'm right, we can't engage in this battle unless we have something in common. We must have a field of battle. Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle. And you can't have a battle between the tiger and the shark because they have nothing in common. They live in different elements. So under all conflict, under the warfare between the dog and Lucifer, there must be something in common. But Christianity doesn't admit that publicly. The devil is wrong, wrong, wrong.

[37:47]

And he has nothing to be so wrong. He, out of his own perverse utterly damnable malicious mind invented evil. And there will never, never be any restitution for that. The devil damned himself eternally, deliberately, the minute he, in the beginning of time, did the first evil thing. There was no excuse for it, no mitigation, nothing. He is out. And if you join forces with the devil, you're out too. That's the good old adage, you know. Whereas on the contrary, Hinduism is based on the idea of dramatics. And that means its view of the universe is basically playful.

[38:52]

A drama is a play. The stage is divided from the auditorium by the trusenium arch. And that arch says anything that happens behind this arch isn't serious. It's only a play. So when the hero stabs the villain, you know that that's a sword in which the blade shoots up into the handle with a spring on it. It doesn't really stab him. But the great actor is the one who gets the audience on the edge of their chairs with anxiety and suspense because he almost persuades them that it isn't a play at all. Now that's the Hindu idea. That the audience is the lord and the actor is the lord. And the lord has acted so well

[39:58]

that he has deceived himself and is just forgetting that it's a play. He has, however, way, way in the back of his mind what the Germans call a hintergedanke, which means a hidden suspicion that it's a big act. And every one of you has that hintergedanke. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to have the courage to go on living. You really don't confess it to yourself at all. And some people, it's the very devil to get them to admit it. The way they defend themselves against saying that this isn't real. That life is play. Oh, you couldn't say that life is a play? That would be awful. And so, you see, the actor is there on the stage trying to convince the audience

[41:00]

that it isn't a play after all. And for a while the audience is thrilled. Then the actor goes back to the green room behind the scene. But there in the green room everybody takes off his mask and his costume and stops playing roles and assumes his ordinary self. The actor in the green room becomes again the common man. Who do you suppose the common man is? Now we've degraded the meaning of the common man. Today the common man means any average moron. The real meaning of the common man is the man, capital M, who is common to us all. The man we all have in common. In other words, the Atman, the Self.

[42:00]

The Adam-Kadmon. The one that we all are. You know, on one big sow many tits, through which milk comes. So on one big cosmos many persons, through which the light of consciousness comes. And so, back in the green room, Hamlet becomes the common man. And of course though they retire there and then they come out just before taking off their costumes and they come in front for the curtain call. And then the audience applauds. They applaud the hero and they applaud the villain. Because the villain did a good show of being a villain. And there wouldn't have been a play unless there had been a villain. Because all plays have essentially a similar plot. You have a status quo, everybody's getting along all right and then somebody comes in and makes a message.

[43:02]

The villain. And the whole thrill of the play is what do we do with what the villain did? How do we solve the problem that the villain proposed? So in the cosmic thing, if you read Jewish mythology, you will realize that the devil, the Satan, who Samael, who he was originally called, was the district attorney in the court of heaven. The prosecutor. And he was the one who went around and grabbed hold of angels and other creatures and accused them before the throne of God and said that fellow doesn't really believe in you. The whole book of Job is about this. That Satan is not the Christian devil in the book of Job. Satan in the book of Job is a loyal servant of the court of heaven. He's not yet become the enemy of God. But you see, the man who is the prosecutor always makes himself unpopular.

[44:03]

The audience loves the underdog. And when you read murder trials, don't you always have a sneaking hope that the man will get off? He didn't really do it. Don't you always tend in such a situation to take a side against the district attorney? So it was, poor district attorney of heaven became unpopular. And he got demoted to being the Christian devil. But in the book of Job, the idea is that the devil raises a doubt about Job's loyalty. And he says to the Lord, do you think that's a great guy you've created there? And he really loves you and is really faithful. I'll tell you he's not faithful. You just make him suffer and make him squeal. Then you will see what kind of a creature he was, what a mess he was. But the devil lost the wager. Because Job remained loyal. You can't understand the book of Job

[45:09]

unless you see it in the light of that kind of court scene underlying. So, the Hindu is taking the position that nothing in this universe is really serious. And the Christian is taking the position that's quite opposed to that. That it really is terribly serious and you'd better watch out. And the Hindu thinks, that's wonderful. Dear Lord, you are going to scare me to the limit, aren't you? You're going to scare yourself in me. But I am going to play it cool. You can come on with all your thunders. And it may be in the form of prophets and priests

[46:12]

who rave from the pulpit of grand inquisitors. It may be in the form of diseases, plagues, pestilences and famines. You're going to make this universe seem very real to me. But shall we have a bet? And that's what the Hindu does. He says, I don't believe you. You're kidding. Now for the Christian, you see, that's an awful step to take. Terrifying. Would you outface the Lord at the gambling table? He's got the perfect poker face. And he's got a hand full of nothing. You hold all the aces. But the Lord is looking at you as if he had a better hand than that. And he will outface you to the limit.

[47:13]

To help you. To play the game. Because this is the game. Calling your bluff. And you're calling the Lord's bluff. You've been listening to Alan Watts with Part 1 from the seminar Beyond Theology. If you'd like a cassette copy of this lecture, send $9 to MEA Box 303, Sausalito, 94965. Be sure to specify Part 1 from the seminar Beyond Theology. The address again, MEA Box 303, Sausalito, 94965, California. Regardless of that, very clearly, it presented address and rejected.

[48:02]

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