What we're discussing in this seminar is the form of Chinese philosophy called Taoism, T-A-O-I-S-M, philosophy of the Tao or of the way of nature. And this philosophy originates from some period in Chinese history between 600 and 400 B.C. and had an influence on the course of Chinese culture. It is attributed to a person by the name of Laozi, L-A-O-Z-I-U, which literally translated means the old boy. And he was supposed to have been a librarian of the imperial court, who got tired of the sort of snob life of court and disappeared into the mountains.

[01:03]

But before he was allowed to go, the guardian of the gate stopped him and said, Sir, you are such a wise man that you cannot go off without leaving us some of your wisdom. And so he left behind, he stayed in the guardhouse and wrote a very short pithy book called the Tao De Jing. That means the Jing in Chinese means a classic. And so the Tao, it's the book or scripture or something like that, Jing. It's pronounced Tao De Jing. And you can get this easily available. It's by Lin Yutang. It's in the modern library and it's called The Wisdom of Laozi. He is the most humorous philosopher in the world.

[02:08]

In this book of Lin Yutang's The Wisdom of Laozi, he translates whole sections of Zhuangzi as a kind of commentary on the earlier text. And this man is full of anecdotes and wonderful illustrations. And he has the most amusing way of explaining his own philosophy by parodying it. For example, he gives an illustration of the advantage of being useless, which is that there was a tree that he came across on his travels, which was absolutely enormous. Never seen such a vast tree. But he went up to it and found that the leaves were rough and no good for eating. That the seeds were very hard and couldn't be chewed. That the branches were all crooked and used for sticks. That the tree itself, the basic wood, was pithy and was useless to a carpenter. And therefore, because it had no use whatsoever, it grew to an enormous size and survived.

[03:14]

He illustrates this also with the story of a hunchback who was so deformed that the ceiling was on his stomach. And his buttocks were up by his shoulders. I don't know how he managed that. But anyway, when the recruitment officers came around, he was always rejected. And when the social service people came around, he was the first to get a free handout. So he points out from this the usefulness of being useless. But you know, they're extraordinarily exaggerated tales. Another thing he does is philosophy in the mouth of Confucius. And to the confusion of everybody. One day, Confucius and his disciples were wandering along near a river where there was a tremendous cataract. And they saw an old man step into the river above the cataract and be completely sucked in. And they thought, well, it's some poor old fellow who's tired of life. That's it.

[04:16]

But a few minutes later, way down below the cataract, the old man went running along down the bank. And so, post haste, he sent one of his disciples to pick him up. This is extraordinary. And so, finally, he got to meet the old man. And he said, well, I thought you were about to commit suicide. But how is this your secret of surviving through such a cataract? And he said, oh, nothing special. I just abandoned myself to the nature of water. I went in with a whirl and came out with a swell. And so, you know, he's full of tales like that. He has a passage where he says, one night I dreamt I was a butterfly. But now I'm confused, because now I've woken up. I don't know whether I'm a man who dreamt I was a butterfly, or whether I'm a butterfly who's dreaming that I'm a man. And then again, he has an amusing passage where he says, when a drunk man falls out of a cart, although he may suffer, he does not die.

[05:20]

Because his spirit is in a state of security, he does not suffer from contact with objective existence. If such security may be got from wine, how much more may be obtained from the dove? And so this, you see, is an illustration of what I was talking about last night. Let me revise, for the benefit of newcomers, then, what we covered last night. There are, I covered three principles of this philosophy. The first is the dove itself. This is dove. There's no definition for it. It's called the way, the course of things. It's what everything basically is, what you are. And it can't be defined, and shouldn't be defined, in just the same way that you have no need to bite your own teeth.

[06:30]

Or to touch the tip of this finger with this finger. Or to look into your own eyes. It's basic to everything. Eternal. It's what there is. It's the witch than which there is no witcher. But it would be wrong to translate it as God, because the word God has associations that this word doesn't have. The word God has an association, as I'm going to develop this morning, with monarchy. And the Taoist conception of the world, and the Taoist attitude to politics, is not monarchical. Democratic. So that's the first principle, that this is the course of nature. The second principle was this one, which means arising mutually. That is to say, that all the great contrasts of life, black and white, positive and negative, or as the Chinese call it, yang and yin,

[07:41]

self and other, long and short, are not, as it were, things in conflict. They are like the north and south pole of a magnet. They go together. And from this arises the fundamental point, that you, as self, are one life with everything you call other. Your inside goes together with everything outside you. And you interdepend, you constitute one life. And it is not that the external world or the environment is conceived as something that determines you, that pushes you around, nor on the other hand, that you are something that pushes around your environment. You are a single movement, a single life. Only through a hallucination of upbringing, education, all kinds of things, we don't feel this. We come to feel ourselves instead as separate centers of awareness and of action in the middle of a world that is not ourselves.

[08:53]

And so there develops a hostile attitude, expressed in such phrases as the conquest of nature. Some people think, for example, of the artist as a person who beats his material into submission. Who takes a piece of marble and clobbers it until it does what he wants it to do. But this is not the Chinese conception of man. Man is seen in Chinese philosophy, in Taoism in particular, as part of nature, or one with nature. And therefore art is a skillful work of nature. The artist cooperates with nature in the same way as the sailor of a sailboat cooperates with the wind. And so this process of cooperation is in Taoist philosophy called Wu Wei. That's W-U-W-E-I.

[09:55]

This is Wu Wei in Chinese. It means, essentially, not interfering. Not acting in such a way as to go against the grain of things. But on the other hand, it doesn't mean passivity. It means acting in accordance with the course, in accordance with the Tao, the way. And again, sailing is, as I said, the illustration of that. Now then, I said a moment ago that the word Tao should not be translated as God, or be really associated with the idea of God as we have it in Jewish, Islamic, and Christian theology. The reason for this is that the model on which the idea of God is based

[10:59]

is the model of the great kings of the ancient Near East. The pharaohs of Egypt, the shahs or khans of Persia, and people like Hammurabi of the Chaldean culture, the great lawgivers and tyrants. The title of God in, say, the Old Testament is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And therefore, everybody in relation to God is in the position of being a subject to a king, or perhaps a child to an authoritarian father. Now of course, this symbolism in sophisticated Christian theology is not intended to be taken literally. A sophisticated Christian is not required to believe that God is the cosmic male parent.

[12:04]

But symbolism has a tremendous force. It influences the way we think and feel and behave far more powerfully than abstract ideas. And although you may consider God to be a necessary being, in the phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas, or that circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, to use St. Bonaventure's phrase, or some kind of thing like that. Nevertheless, if you say our father prayer, and if you go to church and take part in the courtly rituals, where you know a church is sometimes called, an important cathedral is called a basilica. And that is from the Greek, basilis, a king. And so a basilica is a king's court.

[13:08]

Now in a royal court is a touchy place. The king sits with his back to the wall, you better. And he has his guardians on either side of him. And everybody who comes in there has to kneel down or prostrate themselves because they can't fight that way. And that shows the king's a very nervous fella. He doesn't trust anybody. But that you see is the pattern of worship. In the ancient form of church. Of course in the Protestant churches the pattern is not the court of a king, the pattern is a courtroom. And the minister wears the same robes as the judge. Still political model. And that has a great influence on people. I don't know how you can be citizens of a republic, and believe that a republic is the best form of government,

[14:09]

and believe in a monarchical order of the universe. Doesn't make any sense. You can't be loyal to the United States, and believe in a monarchical theory of the universe. So that requires an adjustment of the whole notion of God. Now, in this Chinese philosophy of the Tao, the Tao is not considered as the boss. There's a passage in the Tao Te Ching where he says, the great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. And when merits are accomplished, that means simply good things are accomplished, it lays no claim to them. In other words, the attitude of the Tao,

[15:10]

supposing we could personify it, would be to bring things into order by letting them go their own way. Now the Tao Te Ching, you must remember, is a manual written for the guidance of rulers, and explains how the emperor should conduct himself in order to be a beloved ruler. And the message is, man get lost. Conceal yourself. Don't stand above the people. Don't make them aware of your weight oppressing them. Stand below. Behave like water, because water seeks the low level which men ordinarily avoid. So, the Taoist ruler would, in our language, be something like the chief of the sanitation department, who is an unknown official, but a very important one.

[16:16]

He doesn't ride in great carriages and processions with crowds turning out to cheer. He is a completely humble official who performs an extraordinarily useful task and regards himself as the servant of the people. Fancy, you know, one of the titles of the Pope is the servant of the servants of God. And of course this was one part of the gospel where Jesus washes his disciples' feet and explains that he is among them as one who serves. But this doesn't somehow fit in with the other imagery of the royal master. Christ, our royal master, leads against the foe. Forward into battle, see his banners go. And in Milton's Paradise Lost, long before there was any trouble with Satan, Milton describes the angelic host of heaven with all their banners and spears and military arrangements.

[17:20]

What were they afraid of? Who were they out to attack? See, the minute you do that, you stir up trouble. And so Lao Tzu explains in his book that the moment you have weapons, there is going to be war. The moment you have valuables, there are going to be thieves. And so there's a funny idea underlying Taoism that you might say it's a sort of version of the Golden Age. That once upon a time, every body followed the Tao naturally. And nobody ever talked about the necessity of virtue, of loving your neighbor, of filial piety, of anything like that, because it was all done naturally. But when it fell apart for some reason or other, then arose the laws. And so he says, when the great Tao lost, there came duty to man and right conduct.

[18:23]

When there was trouble in the kingdom, one heard of good administrators and loyal ministers. Because of course, when everyone in the world, I'm quoting again, knows goodness to be good, there is already evil. Now, what are we to make of this? Are they meaning literally that once upon a time, there was a Golden Age when human beings lived in a natural happy state and didn't have governments and taxes and armies? Well, we don't know. It may be harking back to some sort of infancy memory of life in the womb. But let's think of it this way. There is obviously, there has been a point in the development of living organisms, especially the human organism, at which we developed

[19:29]

what we will call the rational will, choice, decision-making, thinking things out. Because this seems to be, when we compare our behavior with animal behavior, this development of the rational will seems to be recent. Apparently, so far as we know, animals make their decision as to what to do without choosing. They do what they feel like. And, therefore, they don't worry. The moment you have to make decisions, you start worrying. Because you are not sure, A, whether you made the right decision, whether you thought about it cleverly enough, and, B, whether you had enough information

[20:32]

on which to base your decision. And so we are fraught with anxiety. Also, you cannot make decisions in this way without being aware of time. Because all decisions depend on a knowledge of the future, and a knowledge of the future depends on projecting the past ahead of you. You think about the past, and you make bets on how, by past experience, the future is going to turn out. And so everybody knows they're going to die. Everybody knows they're going to get old. Everybody knows there's problems ahead, and that, generally speaking, one eventually falls apart. Well, human beings worry about that. But if you don't think about it, you don't worry about it. So we have a sort of nostalgia in us, all of us, for a time before we had to worry. When you were a child, your parents made the decisions. You didn't make important decisions.

[21:32]

Great. Because decision-making is a thing that most people block at. Okay, one important decision a day is enough. But when it's decision after decision after decision, as when you're in an important administrative or executive position, then people start getting ulcers. And so look back longingly to being able not to have to decide, but let your inner feeling tell you what to do. Now, we would say, from a practical point of view, oh, that's terrible. Think what would happen if you didn't make decisions and you just followed your inner feeling. What chaos there would be. What a disorganized world we would have. I want you to think this one over. Would it be any more disorganized than it is already? It's a pretty good myth right now.

[22:38]

And it's getting more complicated all the time. Because of the very nature of control. Now, this is absolutely crucial to Taoism. The problem of control. Look at it this way. In the United States of America, we have a naive faith in law. And when anything goes wrong, we say there should be a law against it. Well, when you make a law, you have to write it down in words. And a clever lawyer comes around and says, but that only means a certain thing. It doesn't mean this. And he finds a loophole in it. But then the lawmakers say, no, no, no, that wasn't what we intended at all. We've got to write this law more clearly. And then they put in a foresaid whereas, and then they repeat synonymous words in series, devise, bequeath, and consign, or whatever it is.

[23:40]

And so that there can be no doubt about it. But then it all becomes incomprehensible. And it takes a special kind of lawyer to understand it. Then what about enforcing the law? Well, people are supposed to obey the law. But it's all sort of understood that they're not going to. And therefore, officials of various kinds, police and so on, bureaucrats, civil servants and so on, have to be employed to enforce the law. Well, then that introduces other complications. Because who's going to be sure that they do their duty and are not corrupt? As we all know, there is an alliance, a symbiotic relationship, between police and criminals. Because if there weren't any criminals, the police would be out of a job. Therefore, the art of policing is to be sure that criminals exist that are kept down to a dull roar. But you see, let's take income tax. The average income tax return

[24:44]

is as difficult to fill in properly as to extract a cube root, arithmetically. Well, then you turn it over to an accountant. Well, that means you've got to watch your accountant and see that he's not letting you in for trouble. And how do you know what your accountant's doing if you don't know as much accounting as he does? And so it goes. Now, you see what's happening? Because we are trying to protect ourselves by a legal structure, we are getting less and less freedom. You can't operate a small business without so much paperwork that you're absolutely engulfed by. You can't be like, say, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, which has a vice president and a whole floor of secretaries in charge of relations with the government. Big corporations can afford that sort of thing.

[25:45]

But the individual is in difficulty. And more and more, every individual enterprise that we engage in is blocked by snowstorms of paper and hours of figuring and legal this and that. And so, because of our anxiety to protect ourselves legally, we lose our freedom. This is what Lao Tzu is saying. Because, you see, what is happening is this. Now, you could say the opposite of Lao Tzu's book of advice to the ruler is an Indian book called the Artha Shastra. Artha, A-R-T-H-A, means political science. Shastra means authoritative text on. And it's a book of advice to a man who would be the perfect tyrant. Imagine one of those

[26:46]

great Hindu emperors of the Maurya dynasty. Living, oh, 1300 or so. It tells the emperor, you are called upon, it is your dharma, your duty, to rule. And you must face the fact that you've got to do it. And you're never going to succeed. Because every time you extend your power, you are going to create an opposition. And in the end, the opposition will pull you down. But while you're doing it, you've got to be like a spider in the middle of a web. And you arrange your subordinates in concentric rings. Every other ring you set at odds with the one next to it. On the principle of divide and rule. So that you have round you some immediate ministers. Your grand vizier

[27:48]

and so on, master of the bedchamber and whatever it is, you know. And then outside them, lower in rank, you put people who hate your immediate ones. And therefore, we'll spy on them and report to you if they're in any way unfaithful to you so that they can get up a higher step. And so all the way around you have this. Furthermore, then you have a guard system. You have the outer guards who are apparently guarding you. The inner guards who are watching the outer guards. They are concealed behind the walls. You yourself have an inner sanctum where you have a special slave to taste your food before you eat it. And you can never really sleep. You always have one eye open. You sure can't go for a walk in the park as you're watching all the time. You're like Big Brother in 1984. Eyes watching those television screens to see what everybody's doing. And finally, you have an escape hatch

[28:49]

right down through the middle of the palace that goes out to the river where you've got a speedboat waiting for you. If real trouble happens. And on the way down in that passage there's a special beam whereby you can remove the cornerstone of the whole palace and bring it crashing down on everybody in it. Now this is the thing about control. If you control everything it isn't worth it. You can't furthermore because you can't control the controller. Who's going to guard the guards? Who's going to police the police? Who's going to dictate to the dictator? It's a snarl that develops here. A law of diminishing returns that the more things are governed the less life is worth living.

[29:50]

Now in Chinese philosophy there is a basic assumption about human nature which is completely different from ours. That is that human nature is good and must be trusted. The West has various theories of human nature. If we go back to the ideas in the biblical ideas of original sin then we know human nature is fallen and corrupt. If you don't believe the Bible you still believe that human nature is corrupt because you believe it's irrational. It's a basic blind lust and hunger a la psychoanalysis or just sheer irrationality because after all the human brain is a fluke that came into being as a result of the gyration of unintelligent forces. It's a mere statistical emergence. So you can't trust people. You assume

[30:58]

that they're all bastards they're basically selfish and the people who are cooperative and have good intentions are doing so because it's to their advantage. And therefore you don't trust others and you don't trust yourself. All right, what's the result of that? The result of that inevitably mutual mistrust ends up as the police state. The police state ends up as a war-making imperialism that destroys itself. Crash. So the Chinese say if you can't trust yourself you can't trust the notion that you ought not to trust yourself. If you are basically absurd even that notion that you're basically absurd is untrustworthy. You're all fouled up. Now if you do trust yourself and you do trust other people

[31:59]

it's not always going to work. If you leave your door open maybe a thief will walk in. If you trust your instincts maybe you'll make a mistake. But it's a better gamble in the long run than not trusting at all. As you see a society depends on mutual trust. We sitting around here we trust each other. So we can come into this room feeling that it's quite safe nobody's going to pick our pockets or strangle us or do anything like that. But we're friends. And a community depends on this kind of trust. It depends on assuming that other people want to live together that they will keep the general rules and so on and will not have to have violent people around to clobber everybody. Now as I say you can't rely on this absolutely. There will always be slips there will always be mistakes. Just as you know in business

[33:01]

there will always be losses there will always be products that don't work out and so on but on the whole you've got to gamble. Nothing ventured nothing gained. And unless you gamble you have no life. Unless you take the risks that go with freedom you have no freedom. So then this is the basic Taoist attitude that human nature is to be trusted and this includes not only those aspects of human nature which we formally call good but also those which we call bad. That is to say man's passions. You see we have in all of us greed hunger lust irritability and so you might say that in every human being there is an element of irreducible rascality. In Hebrew theology this is called the Yetzer Hara which God

[34:02]

planted in Adam so that there would be something going on. It's all the wayward spirit it means literally the Yetzer Hara. And so in Chinese philosophy this is the yin aspect the dark side of human being but you see they say the human being would not be a perfect human being unless he had both sides. He might be an angel but that wouldn't be human. A human being is an amazing combination of angel and animal and it's a fully rounded human being develops both sides of himself. For example if you are a mystic and not a sensualist or a sensualist and not a mystic you're not a complete human being. A mystic who has no sensuality is a stuffed shirt of some kind. He's an impossible person. He's full of he's like pure alcohol. Now

[35:04]

good things to drink like a fine wine has both alcohol and body and aroma and taste which is the sensuous aspect. The alcohol is the spiritual aspect. Whereas on the other hand Mogan David wine is sicky sweet stuff which doesn't have a sufficient alcoholic or dryness to it you see. It's overwhelming so is grenadine and awful goop like that. And that's like people who are purely sensuous. After a while purely sensuous people are a bore to themselves and to others. They become slobs. And you know when life is full of nothing but sensuous gratification sports cars hi-fi Chanel number five bosoms and bottoms it all after a while gets perfectly tasteless. The bottoms feel like plastic. Whereas on the other hand

[36:07]

what you need in addition to sensuality in life is a sense of wonder of not understanding everything. You need sometimes asceticism abstinence cold rough blankets sleeping out of doors cold water as that invigorates your senses and you don't get sated. So then the highest form of man is in Chinese philosophy one who is developed on both sides. So the Taoist poets are very genial people. They are not like Hindu ascetics. They are not like Christian monks with their very severe attitude to life. The Taoist poet likes wine and women in moderation. He has a sense of humor about himself.

[37:08]

And that's the most important thing of all in Taoism is to have that kind of twinkle in your eye that recognizes the element of irreducible rascality in yourself and in others. That is to be truly human. Now look look at this. Why? People's vices are often more to be trusted than their virtues. There is nothing so troublesome as power in the hands of the righteous. If you wage war for ideological reasons because you are good and the enemy is bad there can be no compromise. You must annihilate the enemy because he's bad. And such a war is fought with total

[38:11]

ruthlessness. But if you wage war out of greed because you want to possess the enemy's property you are careful not to ruin it completely. We have brought the art of warfare today to a state of total insanity because the main people exposed to attack are the women and children whom we were supposed to be protecting. In the next war join the Air Force you'll be safe. You'll be way up there when the bomb hits or way underground somewhere. The women and children will be the sufferers. And it'll be so stupid because if we say go to war with the Chinese to get rid of them any sensible person who went to war with the Chinese would go to get all those lovely girls over there. But they'll be destroyed. You see how sometimes what we call disreputable motives

[39:12]

can be less harmful than reputable motives. When you're able to come off it and stop being righteous. So in Chinese ideas of law in legal procedure it's considered very bad form. I'm not talking about modern China I'm talking about old China. It's very bad form to go to court. Any reasonable person will settle out of court. Because they'll get together and compromise and they'll talk and say well, well, well we've got to make a deal here of some kind. You give in so much I'll give in so much. And that is the definition of a reasonable man. And indeed unless you are a reasonable man you're not really human. Now if it does get to court then they have ideas about what is a good judge. A good judge has to have above all a sense of equity. Because Taoist

[40:14]

and in this the Confucians agree every case is different. Circumstances alter cases as we say. And therefore no law can be written which applies to every case. So a judge has to have a certain innate sense of fair play. And he decides by that rather than by the book. A judge who decides by the book is considered crude and unintelligent. But a judge who feels it out he has there are two Chinese words both of which are pronounced Li. And they both have to do with the nature of law. But one means a sense of equity. The other I'm going to explain in a little while. So this is an important illustration in the art of government and how the yin and the yang

[41:14]

the good and the bad the rational and the instinctual the intellectual and the passional must go together in a perfect human being. So don't the Taoist would not say at all somehow subdue and obliterate your sensuous and emotional drives but cultivate them. Now you see what's the difference between cultivating? Cultivating you cultivate a garden. That takes work. It's a discipline. You have to weed and encourage some plants to grow and others not to. But if you try to obliterate weeds with weed killer you're liable to destroy the plants that you want. And if you spray everything with flit and bug death and so on eventually you get chemicals in your food which give you

[42:15]

the great Siberian itch. So you've got to be very careful to respect in a garden the balance of nature. You must allow some worms some snails and encourage birds around. Birds will eat the snails the snails will eat the lettuce it's true. But keep the balance going. You've got to pay a tax on your lettuce for some snails. It's like you've got to pay a tax for the police and so on. Sanitation department and so on. So you keep the balance and this is fundamental to Taoist thought is respect for the balance of nature. And we need to know this. We have a relatively young science in the West called ecology. Ecology is the study of organisms and their relations to their environment. It's a study of symbiotic principles. How everything goes with everything else. How we depend for our life

[43:16]

on microorganisms certain chemicals in the atmosphere certain gases how these gases are derived from trees how trees must be watered how rivers must be taken care of etc. etc. It's an enormous complicated network. And the Taoist is saying that network you see that whole complex interconnection of forces is the real you. That's who you are. You're not just this thing inside the bag of skin. Even though you've been taught to feel that way that as I said is a hallucination. You are this enormous complex of relationships and you must trust it because it is intelligent. It's the only intelligence you have. Now once again in trusting it there will be slips. You will make mistakes and maybe fatal mistakes to you as an individual organism.

[44:17]

But unless you are willing to make fatal mistakes you will destroy everything. Not only yourself but others too. So there has to be this attitude of trust in faith in the whole complex process of nature. Well now we tend in the West not to trust nature simply because we feel that nature is inferior in intelligence to man. We make a separation between ourselves. We say I came into this world

[45:19]

as if we didn't belong to it. We feel that we are intelligent organisms trapped in an unintelligent environment. After all most of this world consists of rock and fire blazing gases whirling galaxies and we look out on all that and say well it's big but stupid. It's just whirling around. It has no brains etc. etc. And so it's common idea you know that human beings are little germs living on a ball of rock that swings round a minor star on the outer fringes of one of the smaller galaxies. And you don't matter. But that's simply a myth. It's a way of looking at things. From the point of view of modern astronomy

[46:20]

any place in the universe can be regarded as the center because space is curved and it is as if you had a ball on the surface of the ball which point is the center? Any point can be the center. Just turn it. So if you look at it like that and there's the center turn it that way there's the center turn it that way there's the center. Any point can be the center. We are smack in the middle of it all. And furthermore this germ may be tiny it may be way out on the edge of a galaxy but it has a brain which can comprehend and contain the whole thing. And furthermore that brain didn't grow there except in the sort of environment in which such a thing could grow. Supposing you have a plant

[47:22]

and you look at it and it has no flower on it no fruits on it you might say it was a weed. Later you come back and you look at it and it's got fruit and flowers and you say oh it's not a weed after all it's a flowering plant. Hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of centuries ago somebody in a flying saucer from another galaxy could have visited this planet and found no life on it. They say oh it's just a bunch of rocks. They come back later and they find it's covered in people. Excuse me they said you were a peopling rock after all because you see the natural environment peoples in the same way as an apple tree apples. And so we live in a peopling galaxy. It may have peopled only in a small part of itself but after all you don't expect the whole tree to flower. But we are a symptom of the kind of world we live in

[48:24]

and in turn the kind of world we live in get this is a symptom of us. Goes both ways. Because it is your organism with its fantastic intricacy which evokes from the electrical environment light sound color shape and all weight hardness softness liquidity all the qualities of nature. Remember the point without you as we were discussing the relationship of the rainbow. Where is time without someone to time things? Time is a relationship. Where is distance without being without a foot we measured distances in feet. Because it is in comparison

[49:24]

to the human organism that we think things big or small. Without this organism nothing is big nothing is small. But you see we have been brought up with another attitude to nature to differentiate ourselves from it to feel that we are spirits from another world than this altogether who are imprisoned in bodies and have somehow exiles from our true home out in this world. Whereas the Taoist feels that we are not exiles at all. We didn't come into this world we came out of it like fruit from the branch. We are symptoms of it we belong in it. You've been listening to a lecture by the late Alan Watson titled The Philosophy of the Tao Part 2

[50:24]

If you'd like a catalogue of all Life and philosophy is what we shall translate into English as naturalness. And in Chinese there is a saying in Chinese the word for nature or the word which we translate into English as nature is pronounced approximately zuran in Japanese shizen and it means that which is so of itself or literally self-so. So yes this you see is romanized z

[51:25]

but this J for some reason or other they put a J for a sound that isn't a J at all it's zuran zuran it's almost like an R not quite. And so this is literally this is a this means self it's an eye with a crest on the top which means a face and this means so thus like that. And so what their idea of nature is what is not you see we use the word nature in two senses we mean on the one hand that aspect of the universe which is not human nature study natural history we also mean classification when we use the word of what nature is this that means of what kind because all the early western treatises on nature were classification books when John Scotus origina wrote one of his great works

[52:32]

in the 10th century he called it de divisione naturae concerning the divisions of nature because the whole idea of nature in the west is concerned with dividing things into classes so you see the Chinese word which we translate nature is different it doesn't mean it almost means automatic except that when we use the word automatic it has a mechanical connotation this means automatic with an organic connotation as to say your heart beats of itself your eyes see of themselves your ears hear by themselves you don't have to tell them to so if you were to get up in the morning and have to switch your brain on and go through and see that all the circuits were connected you'd be all day getting ready and fortunately we don't have to do that because it does it of itself and so

[53:33]

it can also be translated spontaneity the saying in Lao Tzu's book Tao Fat Zi Ran is the Tao's principle the principle of the Tao is Zi Ran and that connects with what I was telling you yesterday about the difference between the idea of the Tao the way of nature and the western idea of God because there is always in the Hebrew and Christian idea of God some idea of monarchy some idea of ruler of the universe the boss whereas in the Tao idea the Tao doesn't rule the universe Lao Tzu says elsewhere the Tao does nothing and yet nothing is left undone because you see you mustn't think of the Tao as something other than separate from what you're looking at now all that you're looking at you can't see anything except the Tao all around you

[54:34]

the way of things and to use one word for it like Tao why would you say perhaps it's not necessary why don't we just say everything there's a little hint in this you see that everything is a unity and at that a harmonious unity even though there are conflicts in it but there are harmonized conflicts in the same way as for example in certain forms of music you will include discords in a fugal progression and so the discords will be resolved so in the Chinese theory of the universe every discordant event is resolved in a presiding harmony which includes all of nature I once talked to a woman just a perfectly ordinary nice lol little old lady and she told me about she'd had an accident

[55:35]

in an elevator and she'd broken a leg and got stuck under the elevator and she was there for half an hour before anybody could get to her and she said in that moment she realized that in this whole universe there was not one single grain of sand that was out of place and that is a curious vision that comes to people occasionally when you see suddenly that you've been looking at things in absolutely the wrong way and it's really weird you don't talk to other people after this because you'll be so misunderstood but you see that the most frightful things that can possibly happen fit in with this it's very strange and very odd but the reason is of course you see that when you get rid of the idea of the governor and the governed the boss

[56:36]

and the employee the king and the subject there aren't any victims every creature that suffers in this world is unbeknownst perhaps to itself doing it to itself no one else is responsible there are no victims because the whole thing is a unity it is of itself so everything is of itself so no one to blame so you see when in nowadays when a child is a juvenile delinquent and people come around the social workers and the police and say now look here this is terrible the child has learned a little psychoanalysis and can say well it was my parents' fault because they brought me up in a traumatic way and they got divorced or my father was a drunkard and my mother was a prostitute and what can you expect so then the

[57:38]

public says well we should get after the parents but then the parents say because they've done a little Freud it wasn't our fault it was our parents who were neurotic too and so you see you pass the buck back back, back, back, back just as in the story of Genesis in the Garden of Eden when Adam was accused of having something wrong with him and the Lord God saw him after eating the fruit he said this woman that thou gavest me she tempted me and I did eat and God looked at the woman and said well now what about it and she said the serpent tempted me and God looked at the serpent and nobody said anything no the serpent didn't pass the buck he didn't make any excuses because he knew and but in this way you see one passes the buck back all the time and says it wasn't me I just got involved in this because you my father were messing around with my mother and you went too far now you've got a baby it isn't my fault that's a terribly

[58:40]

irresponsible attitude see because you must recognize that you were your father's own desire that was you that glint in his eye and that you go back back back imagine an explosion supposing I make a splosh of ink against the thing and you see from the center whoosh all this spray flows out so way back in the beginning of time maybe according to Fred Hoyle there was a colossal explosion which threw out all the galaxies and as the explosion goes out the spray gets finer and [...] you look at it as all one thing it's reaching out like you would spread your fingers like that and you every one of you a little reach out on the end of that big explosion whoosh and you see you go right back to the beginning you your bodies are the most

[59:40]

ancient things that there are it goes whoosh like that yeah it takes millions of years to go splat but you're in it right there you see and you did it right in the beginning you blew this thing up self so of itself everything happens of itself so then there is a wonderful story in another Taoist philosopher whose name is Lietze L-I-E-H hyphen T-Z-U Lietze he was supposed to be able to ride on the wind the reason for that is that when you are in harmony with the Tao it feels as if you're floating you feel light you don't feel you're dragging your body around of something which you have

[60:41]

you it's curious and we say in a song you know walking on air never a care something is making me sing tra-la-la-la tra-la-la-la like a little bird in spring and this walking on air is a curious metaphor that we use because that's actually how we feel so Lietze was always walking on air only of course it's described more fancifully as that he rode on the wind but that's what it really means when Suzuki was asked what is it like what does it feel like to be enlightened he said it feels like ordinary everyday experience except about two inches off the ground enlightened you see there's a sense of this like Chesterton said that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly see it's all this play on light and don't be grave you see gravity

[61:43]

is opposite of levity so Lietze was approached by somebody who asked him how he managed to walk on to ride on the wind well he said when I was a young man I had a certain teacher and I went to him because I heard he could ride on the wind and I wanted to find out how to do so and the teacher completely ignored him so he sat down outside the teacher's hut or actually it was a mountain cave and he sat down outside and after a year there was absolutely no response so he went away then after he'd been away for a while he sort of regretted it because he knew that this teacher had a terrific reputation was a very powerful man so he went back and sat down again and the teacher said why this incessant coming and going

[62:45]

then after he had sat there for a year and he controlled his mind not daring to think of any idea of gain or loss or good or bad and after that year was over the teacher looked at him once for the next year he was meditating more and at the end of that time the teacher invited him to sit inside the cave then for another year he meditated not only not thinking of good and bad profit and loss but also not thinking about not thinking about them and then the teacher spoke to him then finally there came another year when he says in a strange way like this he said I let my eyes look at whatever they wanted to I let my ears hear whatever they wanted to hear I let my mouth say whatever it felt like saying and I let my mind think any thoughts

[63:51]

it felt like thinking and then he said the most extraordinary thing happened I became completely transparent it felt as if my bones were completely dissolved that the eye became the same as the nose the nose became the same as the mouth and the ears and I didn't know whether I was riding on the wind or the wind was riding on me now this thing is this letting the eyes see what they want to see and letting the ears hear what they want to hear is the secret of this harmoniousness with the Tao of being yourself of itself so because we have all these members of the body we have our stomachs our ears our eyes our feet and so on but we are brought up with the idea that you are supposed to be the boss whoever you are and they don't all these organs that we have don't work very well that way let's take the eyes

[64:52]

for example you don't know how you see unless you studied some physiology or neurology and even that doesn't help you to see better than anybody else but you will notice one thing about seeing if you want to see something clearly don't stare at it if you make an effort to see you will simply strain your eyes if you can't see something clearly and a clock in the distance looks fuzzy and you want to tell the time you close your eyes and you imagine that you are looking at a black velvet curtain on a moonless night and then you open them gently and let the clock come to you because eyes although they have muscles that direct them they are

[65:52]

themselves not muscles but nerves and no amount of muscular effort will clarify your sight it's the same with hearing it's a very interesting experiment to let sound come to your ears now why don't you try this why don't you all just close your eyes and gently become aware of the whole world of sound around you in you don't try to identify the sounds and put names on them just let them happen don't feel that you mustn't make any sounds

[66:54]

like belly rumbles hiccups coughing so on that's all perfectly part of the scene just for a moment let all sound happen even when i talk don't make any sense of what i'm saying just sound you should

[67:57]

listen like that before you go to sleep at night and realize that you live in a magical musical continuum all the time but you see ordinarily we keep trying to correct what we're listening to pay attention to this ignore that say to the children shut up i can't hear myself thinking you see but if you really know how to listen you can concentrate on anything you want to in the middle of a complete pandemonium but so in the same way one could give experimental exercises in listening in using your eyes in tasting in feeling things for example picking up rocks and feeling them because all this is letting yourself function just in the same way

[68:59]

as i was discussing yesterday letting your brain give you answers because this is an act of faith in one's own being it is allowing the body to be a democracy instead of a tyranny or shall we say a republic there's a certain difference between a republic and a democracy a republic is rather more efficiently respectable democracy is the sort of ruled by the ignorant majority whereas a republic has some checks on that as in the constitution of the united states which has long been abandoned anyway so when you allow the body in other words to do what it will do then you say well it will do it for me will it now wait a minute

[69:59]

wait a minute wait a minute who are you just as the Tao itself is not something other than the universe not a boss over it you aren't something other than this design which is not just the body but the body and all its relationships to the universe you don't stand apart from that you don't have it you're not in a situation where there's a kind of inspector which is you which watches everything that goes by like you were watching the traffic go by on the street but we think we are that and indeed seem to have a positive sensation of being the inspector who watches all this happen partly because of memory which seems to give an impression that one is a static mirror you see which reflects everything that goes by we get this from

[71:00]

remembering and on the other hand we get it because we are trying to fight change and resist it you see we're resisting all the time if you were physically aware of all your muscular reactions you would find you were going around most of the day doing this you know fighting something you can get a person to lie on the ground and say now look you're completely supported by the floor you won't fall down so let go but it's very difficult for people because they're afraid that if they don't hold themselves together they will turn into a nasty goo that will all fall apart and drip through the floor so everybody is trying to use their skin and their muscles to hold themselves together it'll all take care of itself

[72:00]

you won't fall apart so there's a constant resistance going on and that resistance is experienced you can be aware of it in terms of a sense of strain here between the eyes this is its center and that constant resistance to life and the sensation of it is what you actually feel when you think about yourself I is that feeling of resistance now if you let go there is no necessity whatsoever for an inspector who watches everything that happens you are what you experience your experience and you are the same your thoughts are you your feelings are you so you

[73:00]

there's no necessity whatsoever to try and stand aside from them and be standoffish and say you go away so if you could trust yourself in other words to the flow of what's going on you won't need to resist it and you'll find it works very well just as your eyes work well when you don't try to force them just as the clothes are comfortable when you become unaware of them so you see it is let me explain this further with regard to the eyes your eyes are working beautifully when you're not aware of them but when you start seeing spots and things in front of you that means you're becoming aware of little flaws in the eye if you hear singing in your ears you're becoming aware

[74:00]

of processes in the auditory nervous system and you're not hearing so well the best ears are inaudible the best eyes are invisible and the best body is transparent that's why Lietzer felt himself to be completely transparent now this isn't the same as numbness you see it's quite different because you experience your body in terms of what you ordinarily call everything else in other words as you look around here we are taught to think what I am looking at is out there now imagine this look what's the colour of your head from the standpoint of your own vision of your head yeah nothing now watch it certainly isn't black is it behind your eyes you don't have a

[75:01]

sensation of blackness nor of whiteness there seems to be nothing there at all as if you had no head from your own point of view but actually what it is how it looks inside your head is what you're seeing out here because you see the optical nerves are back here and your experience of all the shapes and colours around you is a sensation of the state of your brain yeah so what you're looking at is inside your head but then you can't be said to be looking at it because inside your head is you so all this is how you feel this is you only it's true for each person it's not more specially you are not more specially me than I am you

[76:01]

it's mutual it's like the dew drops on the spider's web reflecting one another so it is this then this letting your mind work by itself letting your eyes see for themselves that is the preliminary to naturalness in the way that Taoists understand it now let's go on from there to see what they how they express naturalness they use two images one is called the uncarved block and the other unbleached silk and these two images lie at the root of all those great art forms of the Far East that are

[77:03]

associated with Taoism and Zen Buddhism and I'm going to show you the tea ceremony after this because that is the best possible demonstration of this particular mood because it combines it is what you might call the art of the controlled accident because it combines discipline with spontaneity the point of the uncarved block is this you know there's a Japanese art called Bonseki which is the cultivation of stones you might call it the art of growing stones the Japanese national anthem says may our emperor reign a thousand years reign ten thousand thousand years until little stones grow into mighty rocks thick velveted

[78:03]

with ancient moss so there's the idea first of all that a stone is alive next there is a love of stones in their natural shape I have a huge series of slides that I took in Japan of nothing but stones in gardens and they have a genius for the selection of marvellous stones they like stones that you will find in a river which have been worked on with the water until they look almost like clouds and they'll take one of these stones and hitch it up on a mule cart and bring it down and then instead of just dumping it in the garden and patching some moss on it they'll take it away to a corner where it's in the damp and it'll grow moss naturally in Japan moss grows quite quickly naturally when the moss has grown naturally on the stone they move it into

[79:04]

the place where they wanted it exactly in the garden and then they arrange sand round it in such a way that it looks as if it has always been there but not quite not quite and therein lies the genius yes not quite you see now here's the point you cannot you see there is nothing that's not natural nothing at all the idea that there is something artificial is a completely artificial idea because a skyscraper is really as natural as a bird's nest but how to demonstrate naturalness you see it's like what is called in mathematics an asymptotic curve that is a curve that approaches the axis of a straight line here's the straight line now here's a curve going to the straight line it's always getting nearer always getting nearer but never touches it

[80:05]

what we call approximation so the idea is to make a skillful approximation to the natural but if it were just natural and only natural it wouldn't call attention to what it's doing it wouldn't point it out see there is one thing which we all are and whatever I say is it it doesn't make the slightest difference but if that is so I can't point it out to you so there has to be some special little gimmick whereby I can point it out so there is a saying which may be written this way it's a wonderful thing this in Chinese that means a mountain this means

[81:08]

to attain or get this means a mountain and this means water and this means water the mountain gets the mountain and the water gets the water now it means this mountain is so beautiful because it looks so much like a mountain and this water is so marvelous because it looks so much like water and so the idea of the artist then is when he makes a bowl or selects a rock and puts it in place is that the bowl should get the bowl and the rock should get the rock they should look

[82:10]

so much like well that rock you were always looking for so then this other word I mentioned is unbleached silk you know how nice unbleached silk is what we call natural color especially when you get shantung which has a sort of texture in it and it has a sort of well I tell you what is the equivalent in our culture is burlap especially the smell of it and burlap with nubbles in it you know and bits of straw there's a wonderful feeling about that which is what is meant by si it's primitive yes but marvelous when well I'll tell you more about this later but the point is when the great masters of

[83:14]

Taoist and Zen Buddhist art got their minds uncluttered and working properly they suddenly discovered that some of the simplest things of everyday life simple utensils that were used in the kitchen the cheapest rice bowls that might be used by a peasant were extraordinarily beautiful they were unsophisticated they were natural in the same sense we have when a child age three starts dancing there's no self-consciousness no playing to the gallery nothing the child is just dancing that's naturalness now the question is you see for the adult who's all fouled up how to recapture that and this is what the greatest artists sweat blood trying to do to make their work look

[84:16]

as if it had happened by itself as if it had just grown there now there are exceptions to this but the exceptions prove the rule Beethoven in some of his sonatas arranged the fingering to be as unnatural and difficult as possible so as to achieve the impression in the playing of immense effort but that's the exception that proves the rule in the ordinary way the expert musician seems to be using no effort at all it just happens through his fingers but if he wants to portray effort for some artistic reason then this sort of trickery is introduced but the artist works and works and works all his life long to get to become again as a child to regain original innocence and naturalness but you see

[85:18]

what happens through that work in doing the work the artist becomes the master of a tremendously sophisticated technique he knows exactly how to control his hand his brush his paints his chisels whatever he's using but however much you know how to say something how to express something that doesn't necessarily give you something to express and something to say you can be a master of the English language and yet only have boring ideas so then somehow you have to put your technique at the disposal of what we call inspiration that means the Holy Spirit and so in the same way the artist who practices for years and years and years with his brush in the Chinese way

[86:19]

in the end finds that he cannot by any stratagem of his own by any technique or any cleverness he cannot paint and he has to give up and then it happens there was a master once who was painting with calligraphy and his chief student was standing beside him and as he did characters one after another he was just doing one inscription and trying to see get a perfect one and the student said oh no master that's no good you can do better no and the master began to get furious because the student wouldn't approve of any one that he did finally the student had to go out to the jung and the master was furious and he did this thing and the student came back and said it's a masterpiece well

[87:26]

this you see then is what lies behind the all what we can definitely recognize as the naturalistic art of the far east now I hope you know what I'm talking about because there are very very different kinds of far eastern art for example the finest pottery of the Song dynasty which will take us back to a thousand A.D. is completely unlike what most people think of as Chinese porcelain Chinese porcelain one thinks of white eggshell like stuff with very delicate designs of birds and butterflies and fine ladies and children playing battle dawn shuttlecock but the finest Song is heavy jade green soft

[88:30]

very self-effacing in a way and it has a certain roughness or take Japanese so-called rakuware here there is a bowl we shall see some which is definitely handmade it looks as if it wasn't even put on a wheel and the glaze is allowed to drool and the bottom of the bowl the clay has been left exposed but you see that coloration reminds those artists of autumn and they want to see that it is clay because a good potter does not force clay to obey his preconceived ideas he evokes the spirit in the clay to do some magic and he gets the sensation as you get

[89:33]

when you first learn to ride a bicycle do you remember suddenly it seems that the bicycle was doing the work or when you first learn to swim suddenly you found this magical power that happens of itself so young so in the same way when you master the art of pottery it suddenly seems that you put the clay throw it on the wheel and it comes alive of itself so then because the clay did that these artists love the clay they don't want to make the clay look like something else like ivory they want it to look like clay so with clothes these clothes they do no violence to the nature of cloth our clothes have you ever noticed especially for men suits that they're impossible to pack because they have been shaped to fit the human body

[90:34]

and therefore they're all padded and the sleeves go in weird you have to cross them over when you pack them all kinds of nonsense whereas this you see is made of rectangles as the cloth is woven and it folds in a suitcase so well that you don't have to send it to the cleaners when you unpack and also by leaving its nature alone it conforms to the human body and for men Japanese form of dress is the most comfortable ever invented it doesn't castrate you it doesn't hinder you the only thing is you can't run for a bus in a kimono but that makes for certain dignity you see people human beings shouldn't have to run for buses buses run for human beings so you see

[91:38]

how that is that's the principle of the letting the cloth alone let it be like itself it's woven this way don't try to make this flat cloth fit your body you know as if it was some kind of plastic it could be stretched in one place and narrowed in another so with everything wood wood is loved by such artists they love the grain in wood and therefore deplore paint lacquer is another thing it's used sparingly but by and large wood is beautiful and you get a floor like this you see well the nice thing about this floor is you can see it's wood you can see the grain some of you may have been to the Katsura Palace in Kyoto

[92:39]

where they have verandas with the most gorgeous grain wood you ever saw in your life it is simply enchanting I mean it's like looking at some some vision you know you think you're going to go out of your mind looking at this grain gorgeous stuff and so in the same way in the Japanese typical Japanese house by the edge of the alcove called the Tokonoma there is almost invariably a wooden pillar which is made from an un uh planed tree trunk or branch so that you still see the knots in it and the curves and sometimes uh they get I think some rather exaggerated ones that are absurdly nubbly but in the same way that we today have learned to like driftwood that is a thing in line with this Taoist spirit that we appreciate wood as wood

[93:40]

and don't try to make it look like uh marble or uh metal or some something else the same is true with paper the Chinese don't like our paper they say it has no character they like paper with little um threads in them and uh with a texture to it and they feel that that really is paper the paper gets the paper and so uh feel that our paper is some sort of plastic and you see there is something about plastic the it is symbolic of our culture like our bread which is bread yeah you know it's made of just as you turn milk into casein uh we turn wheat into a kind of um basic paste

[94:42]

which is then with um what is it carbon dioxide bubbleized into a sort of all these bubbles made of this plastic film which weigh of nothing you know and then you put it in contact with saliva or with gravy and it immediately disintegrates into a sickening paste like that white stuff they feed to babies and babies always spit back into the spoon well that's typical American store bread and it is it is made of an essential plastic uh which is a non-substance and we are in danger of being engulfed by this through not having love for the uncarved block and the unbleached silk which are fundamental substantial and natural well now we'll have a brief intermission and after that we'll go into

[95:43]

the next room and uh have the tea ceremony You've been listening to a lecture by the late Alan Watson titled Philosophy of the Tao Part Four

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