Many of you have, maybe some of you anyway, have heard Dr. Smith speak before at Tassajara. Some of you may have seen his movie. Maybe if someone closes the back door it will be a little quieter. I've seen the films he's done. One of them on Tibetan chanters, right? They chant in chorus. That's right. I remember before you made the tape, we talked and you said, you were quite excited actually, you said, I've found these men who chant in chorus. You act like no one is going to believe it. Those are the men. And he also knew Sukyoji quite well, and he wrote the preface to the paperback new edition of Zen Minds.

[01:02]

Anyway, he's a professor of philosophy, I think? Chairman of the Department of Humanities? Not the latter. At MIT. He used to, Bill Thompson, who was here the other day, I was just a little professor and he was a big man on campus. He's been at MIT a long time. Pretty long, isn't it? Fourteen years. Fourteen years. Anyway, I'm always, I like preaching very much, and I'm always very moved by his talks. I feel lucky to have him here today. Thank you. I don't know, I would prefer to sit, but I think maybe with a room of this size, I don't know, I can't see everyone.

[02:07]

I guess I really want to stand. I'm glad you mentioned Suzuki Roshi, Richard, because I do feel that anything that I would say here should be said in the living memory of that life. Well, I, welcoming this opportunity, thought I would use it to think with you about what has, I guess without giving it too much thought, I had assumed that the chief distinctions within religions

[03:13]

were, you might say, consisted of a vertical line which could represent divisions between the major great historical traditions. What, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, so on, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, just to mention some of the principal ones. Now, recently I've become convinced that the basic distinction is really a horizontal one which should be drawn this way and which cuts right across all the traditions. And I've been using, in my own mind,

[04:18]

the words esoteric and exoteric to designate this distinction. Let me move into it just quite personally. I have sat with, I can just move them through my mind, Swami Satprakashananda in Hinduism, Goto Sugan Roshi and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in Buddhism. I would have to leave the Chinese area blank even though I was born there because I haven't been back to the mainland since my youth,

[05:19]

so I can't name anyone in that tradition. In Judaism, Hugo Bergman in Jerusalem, Thomas Merton in Christianity, the Sheikh Isa in Islam. As I say, I have sat with these men in absolute accord, just not a ripple, not a thread of division present. Meanwhile, I could take, well, if I take the tradition that I grew up in, Christianity, I can turn on, what, an evangelist from Los Angeles or some of the InterVarsity Fellowship people, say, at MIT and all kinds of static going on across this line. Well, that's why experientially,

[06:22]

and I could duplicate that in the other traditions too, there are certain representatives in those traditions with whom I sense just an enormous, in ways, unbridgeable gulf. So this seems to be the basic distinction. And it's that that I want to explore. I'll use about 15 or 20 minutes to unpack, to lift to direct attention the differences between these two modes of apprehension, of approach in the religious field, and then we can open it up to your comments or questions. Just one more word before going into specifics on the differences.

[07:26]

What I've come to the conclusion provisionally is that there are different spiritual types, personality types, and this is perhaps the most basic. There might be another one if we had the purely secular view out here. That has no religious sensitivity, sensibility, then that's a huge divide too. But this is the divide within the field of religion itself. And there have been all manner of characterologies, delineations of personality types. In the West, our characterologies tend to be on a plane, no sense of better or worse. The Greeks had the phlegmatic, the bilious, the sanguine, the choleric. But those are just differences on the same plane. And similarly, Jung has his extroverts and introverts,

[08:32]

and Jung has another classification of the intuitive type and the rational type. What is it? And the sensing type and the feeling type, I guess. All right, again, no better or worse, no qualitative difference, just differences in kind. In Asia, the characterologies do tend to have a hierarchical and value distinction. In India, for example, we have the sattvic type, rajasic type, and tamasic type. No point in going into that at length. But just to say that those are ranked in a hierarchy, and they say that tamas is overcome by rajas, and rajas is overcome in turn by sattva. So you do move up a scale. I forgot to mention in the West, the recent characterology, I guess, is William Sheldon's, where he has the samatha types, and sareeb.

[09:33]

Well, I forget the terminology, but it's not that important. All right, but this, to come back, this seems to be a fundamental difference in human personality types within the religious sphere. Now, what are the differences? Well, let me begin with the object of religious apprehension. And if we take the governing word, God, in a rather inclusive sense, for the exoteric, God is conceived in personal mode. And Judaism and Christianity are primarily exoteric religions in that, not exclusively, but primarily, in as much as the personal mode is so much in the foreground.

[10:37]

By a personal deity, we can think of one who creates the world by a deliberate act of intent and will, who governs history through providence, who is aware of each individual and loves each individual. For the esoteric, God is conceived in a transpersonal. I think there's something to be said all the way across for both of these types. The fact that we are persons makes it natural that the ultimate shall appear to human beings in some way bearing that coloration. But also this comes into all kinds of logical problems

[11:40]

if one tries to stay with that view. And, as I say, these are those for whom the personal God seems anthropomorphic and personality seems confining and restricting and therefore their intuition breaks through that and moves for an object which is unlimited. And so we have in Hinduism nirguna-brahman, brahman without attributes. On the esoteric level, there's saguna-brahman or brahman with attributes. In Buddhism, of course, there are the three bodies of the Buddha and the sambhogakaya would be more on this level because it would have more personal attributes. But the nirmanakaya, I mean, sorry, the dharmakaya

[12:41]

would be the transpersonal or other terminologies, nirvana or sunyata, transpersonal views of God. In the Chinese tradition, one has the Tao that can be spoken, that's down here, but up here the Tao that cannot be spoken because it's infinite and transcends capacities for conceptualization. In Judaism, one has the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob on the esoteric level, but one also has the tetragrammaton. Those four Hebrew words which, because the vowels were, the points were assumed rather than spelled out, nobody knows how it was pronounced. We used to think it was Jehovah, now the scholars think it was probably Yahweh,

[13:44]

more like that, but nobody really knows because for two thousand years that's been so sacred among the Orthodox that it's been verboten to speak it even. This is the transpersonal God within Judaism. And then in Christianity, the personal view, the theistic view, predominating, as I mentioned, but one also does get among the mystics the concept of the Godhead, Eckhart's view, and also coming out in our time in Tillich's God above God, the God that appears when the personal God disappears. And then in Islam, one has Allah down here, but then the Allah of the supreme name on this level. So an object, then, this seems to be the difference between the two.

[14:47]

By the way, I haven't let you in on this, but I think you're all esoterics, by the way, because I think of Zen as clearly an esoteric, perhaps the esoteric expression par excellence within Buddhism. All right, this is one difference into object. What is the object of religious knowing? And then a second difference would be in mode of disclosure. And the difference here is that in the esoteric, for the esoteric, the mode of disclosure is really formless. Now, there can be symbols of the divine,

[15:55]

but on this level, they're clearly recognized as simply fingers pointing at the moon. And when the Buddha nature is apprehended or the sunyata realized, there's a clear realization this cannot be, this is beyond form, because forms are limiting and the infinite cannot be limited. So as it were, one sees through the forms to that which is symbolized. Now, esoterics, for esoterics what I've just been saying is really meaningless, because the formless

[16:57]

is by their lights non-existent. Anything to be, to be real, requires definition, and that means some form. So the absolute, one might say, I do think of this as hierarchical, the transpersonal erupting on, you might say, a lower level in order to make contact with those for whom form is essential, if anything, is to get through to them. Now, the two major modes, see the distinction here, in mode of disclosure, the esoteric is formless, the divine is formless, but for the exoteric, the divine appears in forms.

[17:58]

So we say it's formed. The two major forms are language and lives. Language would be the revealed scriptures, which one can take as the absolute breaking out on the discursive, verbal level, and manifesting itself to whatever extent it can be manifested on that level. And then in lives we have the incarnation, the avatars, the bodhisattvas, and the like. These are the modes in which the divine can make contact with the exoteric, who by definition, as I have said, require form for there to be meaning. Now, a third,

[19:03]

and we won't go on indefinitely, but two more, a third distinction would be the, what shall I call it, the instrument, the faculty, the faculty for apprehension. And let me start with the exoteric there. For the exoteric, the faculty for religious apprehension is preeminently faith, which is the evidence of things unseen, as Paul put it well, I think. If there is direct, immediate disclosure, no faith is needed. Now, the faculty of discernment

[20:07]

for the exoteric is called variously in the Sufi tradition and Sufism would be the esoteric mode of Islam. In Sufism, it's called the eye of the heart. Perhaps the buddhi might be, or the dharma eye within Buddhism. The difference between these two modes of apprehension at root is that in faith there is still a separation, whereas in the discernment of the eye of the heart, it's a mode of knowing that unites the knower

[21:08]

with what is known, so there becomes an identity. One becomes what one knows in that mode. But precisely because that transcends the subject-object dichotomy and all perception and knowing on the lower level proceeds in terms of that dichotomy, when that dichotomy collapses, what's left is nothing, really zero for the exoteric, but not so for the esoteric. The mode of discernment down here is discursive. It's spelled out through words and concepts. There are ingredient parts and propositions, but in esoteric knowing, it's pure simplicity. Not only does the distinction between knower and knower collapse,

[22:12]

so the one is what one knows, but even the temporal distinction collapses, so you can't say one becomes what one knows, because there is a distinction between past and present. You have to say one sees the one has always been that which one knows, because there's no time in that realm. Now, finally, as a fourth difference, if we look now at the whole field of religion and ask about the relations between religion, are they, you know, the oft-asked question, perennial question, are religions saying the same thing? And again, the answer, must, I'm convinced, turn on this distinction.

[23:13]

For the esoteric, basically yes, because in his eyes, at the heart of all of them, stated in varying degrees of clarity, is the ultimate truth of a reality which is infinite and which transcends all distinctions. And he can find that in all the traditions, and to him that's what is most important. But for the esoteric, the mode of disclosure comes through scriptures, as we've said. It's discursive proposition. And there, the revelation, both in terms of incarnations, they differ. You know, Christ and the Koran are not the same, and Buddha and the Christ, they're different.

[24:15]

Different incarnations and different scriptures which will not be accommodated one to the other. They had to be different because they were addressed to different civilizations. And as those civilizations were distinct in character, temperament, and type, in order for the divine to make contact with them, it had to speak, you might say, to each civilization in its own tongue, its own language. So on that level, I think nothing good comes from trying to sandpaper the edges and get them to seem like they were saying the same thing. On this level, they will appear irreducibly many. Well, one could go on,

[25:19]

but I think rather than prolong this, or even try for a proration, I'll just snap it off right there and invite questions where it seems either obscure or in error, or comments, as you wish. Yes? You say, in this lecture, that you leave out perception, and you go on to make many distinctions. The fourth scandal, we are taught, is will. We make something happen, or we make it not happen by deciding not to do something, voluntarily or involuntarily. And then from that, we set up a state of consciousness, or a field of activity,

[26:20]

which is our world of samsara. In order not to recreate a world of samsara, we have to go beyond life and death. We have to die in this world. This can be done through the practice of samsara. I just wanted to, not to argue with you, but to complete your thought. Thank you. If you want to take this back to Boston, my hometown. What is this? It's a ten-page note from Mexico. Thank you very much. I shall do that happily. There's a portrait of you there. Of me? A tiny one in the corner. Oh. Down there in the corner. Maybe you blotched it up with your folder. I know you did.

[27:21]

No, reading this way, let me point to it. Here it is. Oh, yes. Ah, yes. You don't know yourself. It's looking this way, but that's the way you look. That's even better. The valuation of the currency is going up. That's where the lady says, I'll get that in a bento there. Yes. Let's see, I'm getting all the vertical places straight. In the Christianity, you mentioned a term of Tillich's, the God above God or the God... Beyond God. He uses both of those terms. One interesting point in relation to that is, this again relates to a lecture that we heard here, I don't know, six months ago,

[28:25]

by Dr. Abe, who's another Dogen scholar. He referred to Tillich and Tillich's terminology. Yes. And in terms of trying to, I guess, actually, maybe make pretty much the same distinction that you're making. He was trying to make some connection there and try to use terminology or go into a tradition and see what could be. One of the things that he said at the time, I'd be interested to hear your response to it, is that in Tillich's framework or that kind of framework in Christianity, he seemed to feel that the esoteric Christian tradition that Tillich was expressing, still in comparison with Buddhism, was emphasizing the side of being over non-being. There was not a kind of equality there, which Dr. Abe felt was present in Buddhism. To him, it might serve as some distinguishing feature between esoteric Christianity,

[29:33]

our tradition, and esoteric Buddhism, which doesn't put one over the other. Yes, yes. Do you have any feelings about that? No strong ones. I have heard Professor Abe speak on this theme. Actually, one of the lectures was in Kyoto, and it struck me as suggestive and true, but a bit beyond me, in the sense that his equal affirmation of non-being with being, I'm inclined to say, yes, that's right, but I haven't grasped why it's important. Do you want to say more about that?

[30:37]

Do you think maybe he's still sort of toeing the line, maybe, between esoteric... No, I don't think so. I think he's fully esoteric, maybe a little bit more than I am, and that's why I didn't really grasp. It's very abstruse. I don't know how you found it here, but I felt it was something I would really have to dwell on for a semester or something, at least, rather than hearing it in a lecture. Well, I found it a little more concrete when he referred to it in terms of ethics. Ethics. The ethical version of the same thought would be that the West, or the Christian tradition, sets the ideal of good, or the good, above evil. Yes. As the good is something to be desired, evil is something to be suppressed or conquered,

[31:40]

whereas his feeling is that in Buddhism there's more of a... Ah, that's good. That's useful. It's a little bit more concrete than what he's referring to. And one comment he made about it in particular that I recall is that the more you try to get rid of the evil that you think lurks within you, the more deeply it claws in. Right. Well, now that confirmed my point. Not only he, but as an authentic spokesman for Zen Buddhism, is very esoteric. And those statements do make sense up here, but you can't get along with those statements down here. And I think it's true that if we compare traditions, our Western tradition has been more exoteric than esoteric.

[32:48]

So they're more at home in the way he's talking than we are, which I guess is just what he was saying, perhaps. Yes. In connection with what you were saying about the Buddhist attitude for good and evil, and not the general Western attitude... Could you speak up a little bit? Well... Do you want to stand? Maybe I can speak louder. Something that I've noticed, that I've always sort of stumbled over in our practice here, in connection with... that relates to what Moo was just saying, like just this evening at dinner, we have a prayer we say before dinner, and part of it is that we say that we eat to stop all evil, and to correct the spirit. That just came to my mind in connection with what you said, because that's something that... to me it kind of sticks out of Zen practice,

[33:50]

because ordinarily I don't find that kind of spirit in Zen practice. But I always feel a little funny when I say that, because it doesn't seem to... That should better be translated to honor and shame. In the East, as you remember, when you were a little boy, people don't have any idea of guilt or sin. They have an idea of honoring their father and mother, their country. They can be treacherous people. Mori-san, who is probably here right now, plays gold with me. I fought in the Second World War. They stuck us at Pearl Harbor. That was not a matter of being guilty of doing anything. It was treacherous. It was shameful. General Tojo committed suicide because of it. They had to. They dishonored their mother and father. They dishonored the emperor whom they led into a war.

[34:52]

When you have honor, you can live, study Buddhism, and go on, beyond life and death. This is more the crux of the mentality of Eastern people and Western people. I would like to pick up on that bad translation for a moment, though, because I think it alerts us to a very important question, and perhaps, in my mind, one of the leading unresolved ones here. What is the relation of forms through which religious apprehension —I started that sentence wrong, I have to back up— without which religious discernment cannot function on this level? All right. What is the relation of forms to this level? And my thesis, my tentative view,

[35:56]

but this is the one I guess I wobble most on, is that even for the esotericist, in the long run, the forms cannot safely be skirted. In other words, an esotericist is not one that bypasses the form, but, you might say, sees through the forms, sees the meaning in the forms, delves into them. Now, this in contrast with what would be the alternative? Those who, their religion is entirely formless, they don't have any form because the view is, well, God is everywhere and so on, and we can encounter him directly.

[36:59]

I guess my feeling is that, though in principle that's true, forms are important not only for the exotericist, but for the esotericist to keep the vision in place. Now, I don't know whether you... Well, how does it come back to the bad translation? That something like that, what frees us from evil, what... Stop all evil. Stop all evil. On this level, that still has a meaning. And part of our lives, you know, we are form in some sense, and therefore the key is to see the relationship of the levels and what is appropriate at one level and yet can be transcended at another. Yes.

[38:04]

Do you see this, or is the implication of your idea, the possibility anyway that some actual, beyond the theoretical common ground of all these things, some actual common religious experience, you could call it basic world religion or world practice or basic esotericism or something, is a possibility or that's on the horizon? Well, see, I think most people, unless we have a mutation in humanity type, human types, which I am not waiting for, most people are exoterists. The multitudes, most people are in this mode.

[39:07]

But on this mode, religions differ. So I think the hope, if anyone wanted a hope, for one exoteric religion, meaning that having text, you know, explicit statement, and a common symbolism and so on, I think that is in vain. It's not going to happen. In collectivities, the religions will stay different. Now, meanwhile, you can, the esoterists will continue to be able to understand one another. Does that? Well, but it seems like even on the esoteric level, for instance, the man that you referred to earlier, that you had sat with, and you felt some real common ground, their common experience together may have been you.

[40:08]

But it seems to me that, at least up to now, that even the esoterists, or the best of the esoterists, in each of these traditions, never actually talked to one another or met one another very much. Tibetan lamas never ended up talking to Sufis too much, or I don't know of it anyway, where the Sufis didn't end up talking to the Hasidim or something. It seems like they really had their own separate bags, and they stayed in it. Maybe because of communication problems or whatever, it seems like. Now there's actually some possibility that these things are all coming out, and maybe over the next period of time, something along these lines actually could occur. Do you think that's possible? Is that your hope, or do you have any idea? Well, what's the vision? Esoterics of the world reunite, or something like that? I don't know what our hope is. What are we reaching for? The fact that the great masters didn't come together,

[41:13]

is there any loss in that? Why should they? It's specifically stated in the Daito Sutra that all things, no matter what form they are, no matter where they're born, chapter 3, born of water, born in the air, born of a matris, born of a womb, all things are irrevocably caused to attain complete, unbounded liberation, nirvana. So that's all that's happening. He is telling Subuddhi how to be a bodhisattva. He says, but any person who has the least idea of ego entity, of personality, cannot possibly attain bodhisattva. I want to mention a more direct process of esotericism that you left out, is the North American Indian. Oh, very good. The first god emperor of Mexico, Nezahualcóyotl, stated in a poem written in Jed Lin's little Mage book,

[42:16]

which you can get from him, that we go directly to death. He sat his whole life, he was celibate. They appoint a new god emperor when you die. And his only friend was a parrot that sat on his pipe. Probably tobacco, but maybe put in a tiny bit of molta. The next emperors were pretty much the same, but then they corrupted themselves, and they started to pray for rain when the drought came. They didn't believe anymore in death. So Moctezuma became what is clinically called paranoid. He was frightened, and he started to pray for a white god, Quetzalcoatl, to come from across the ocean. When the Canaan Cortez reached the shores of Mexico, what happened?

[43:22]

500 men conquered Teotihuacan, a city of 300,000. They defeated them again. Cortez sat at the Arbol de Noche Trieste, at the tree of the sad night in Tacuba, but came back, raped the country, brought European locks all over Mexico, walls and locks to these people. The next emperor, Cuauhtemoc, refused absolutely to tell anybody where the gold was. This is willpower. I won't tell you. You can do anything you want to. So they took him and a friend of his, and they burned the soles of their feet. And he said to his friend, if you think I am enjoying this footpath of fire, you are mistaken. This shows you the character and quality of a Mexican Indian.

[44:25]

This goes for the Yaqui, Apache, and Shawmut from Boston, Susquehanna. All of them are pretty much the same. It is my theory, and this is strictly theory, that we are all descended from the great eruption that took place in central Mexico, which formed Mexico City. That all civilization went from that spot, and it did not go the other way. That on the sides of this mountain will cook the things that Buddha talked of, born in air, born in fire, born of a womb, little plants, plankton, lichen, etc. Those who stayed in the deserts, on the mid part of the mountain, where there was no rain, they became the Jews. And they invented guilt. I know I am Jewish. My father, I just had a knife out of that mule. My father wrote me a letter,

[45:28]

and do you know what he said? You stupid bastard. What are you doing? What are you in a trance or something or other? You are walking across the street, and you are meditating. You are guilty. That is how you got hit by a car. It was a Mexican girl thinking about her boyfriend who got away with English lessons. Do you understand? That goes beyond life and death. I don't blame my father. He is an old man. He is damned rich. All the money goes to Zen centers sometimes. Sometimes. Yes. Can you speak a little bit about the exoteric tradition and that's the way of fishing and the major movements and bringing up the Indians. I wondered if you could comment briefly

[46:32]

on what primitive types of people and their beliefs and how they might fit into that. Oh, I am very glad. Yeah. I am glad you brought up the Indians too. Again, I am not certain of what I am going to say, but this is my intuition, that early man was more in touch with the ground of his being than we are. You know, we are so sophisticated in innumerable ways, but I don't think the transcendent shines through the temporal as it did. Now that doesn't mean it was any easier for them, in many ways it was a lot harder, but good or bad, you know, this is beyond good or bad, a sense of there being waves on the sea of the infinite, but the waves are a part of the sea, was more evident to them.

[47:36]

Of course, in the Indian tradition and indeed all the great traditions, it's not a matter of evolution in history, but devolution, you know. It's been downhill and I think this is the accurate thing in what that thesis says. We are in the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, and that means that the divine, well, just what I've been saying, that the infinite is rarely discernible today, only by a few and we have to work so hard to try to perceive it and so on. So, when we speak about the primitives, I think in this respect, they were our betters. They were much more esoteric. Esoteric? Would you put them in the same text classification, esoteric and exoteric, in the same tradition? Yes, I think one could get the distinction even there, but I think the esoterists were,

[48:39]

oh, I don't know, now I guess I'm beginning to, the question's beginning to kind of phase out because I'm trying to psych out the mentality of primitives.

[48:53]

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