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And so he came out to this boy and said, “What’s the fundamental teaching of Buddhism?” And the boy held up a finger. Instantly, the master drew a knife and cut it off. And the boy was very dismayed and rushed away, yelling.

So the master said, “Hey, come back!” So he came back. He said, “What’s the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” And he went to hold up the finger and it wasn’t there. And he was enlightened.

There is a Chinese god whose name is Ping-Ting, and this is the god of fire. And there was a monk who was traveling, and he came to a new master—he had been to someone else—and he said, “Well, who did you study with before you came to me?” “Oh,” he said, “I studied with so-and-so.” He said, “What did he teach you?” “Well,” he said, “when I asked about the fundamental meaning of Buddhism he answered me, ‘Ping-Ting comes for fire.’” “Well,” the master said, “That was an excellent answer, but I bet you didn’t understand it.” “Oh yes,” he said, “I understood it. Because Ping-Ting is the god of fire.

And if Ping-Ting should ask for fire, that would be like me asking about Buddhism, because I’m really a Buddha already.” The master shook his head. “I knew it,” he said, “you missed the point completely. “Well,” he said, “how would you deal with it?” The master said, “You ask me.” So the monk said, “What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” And the master said, “Ping-Ting comes for fire,” And the monk got the point.

Well, you know, you can go on with these stories indefinitely. But you’ll notice certain dynamics in them. They require, as a rule, a solution to a dilemma.

Or they do something that creates what we would call a state of blockage. When you’re posed with something completely unusual, and you don’t know how to react to it in a normal, automatic way. You see, if somebody says to you, in the street, “Good morning,” you say “Good morning,” and you’re not being spontaneous, you’re being merely automatic.

When somebody comes up to you and says, “Are you saved?” Or “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” It’s a very unusual question and it stalls most people. They say, “Well, what do you mean?” Or something funny like that. They feel embarrassed by religious questions.

Somebody might say to you, “Why have you got such long toenails?”—when you’re wearing a shoe and nobody can see it, you see? Anything that absolutely disrupts the normal flow of interchange. Well, then you’re nonplussed.

And the object of Zen is never to be nonplussed. That’s—you see, to be nonplussed is the real meaning of the Buddhist doctrine of what’s called bonnō in Japanese, which means “entanglements” or “defilements.” Or “attachments,” we might call them. Worldly attachments.

It is not a worldly attachment, in Buddhist philosophy, to enjoy dinner. That is natural, you see? It is not a worldly attachment to need to sleep.

That is perfectly natural. But it is worldly attachment to be sticky. That’s to say, to be like a wheel that sticks on the axle and squeaks.

So we are sticky when we are, in a certain way, self-conscious. We are, as we would say, “all balled up” or “all clutched up,” and we’ve lost our original spontaneity. And we are not, as it were, flowing with the stream of the Tao—the course of nature, or whatever you want to call it.

So then all these questions put you in a dilemma. And the point is to see if you can get out of the dilemma without a moment’s hesitation. That doesn’t mean doing it quickly, necessarily, because if you’re in a hurry to give a quick answer, that itself is a form of blockage.

You should all read, in this connection, a translation in Suzuki’s book Zen and Japanese Culture, of a letter written by Takuan, who invented pickled radishes—I told you about, you know? Those yellow daikons are called takuan, after this man. And he wrote a letter on the art of swordsmanship where he explains the necessity of spontaneity in fencing is that, if you have to stop to think about how you’re going to respond to a certain kind of attack, it’s too late.

You’ll be dead. You must respond in the same way as when you clap your hands: the sound comes out without a moment’s hesitation. Or when you strike steel on flint, there is no waiting before the spark comes out.

But he adds: if you try to be quick, this will itself be a block. You may notice that when people are trained in the use of the sword, they get what Anne Clark bought the other day—which is a bamboo sword—to start with. And you can give a person a healthy clobber with the bamboo sword without actually ruining him.

The teacher may well have you work around the house doing various chores as a sort of janitor when you begin in sword school, and will take every possible occasion to surprise you and hitting you with a bamboo sword. And you’re expected to defend yourself with anything available. With the cushion, with a broom, with a saucepan, anything you happen to be handling—defend yourself, immediately.

Well after a while, you know, if you’re going around your everyday work expecting to be jumped on any minute, [it] becomes rather nerve-wracking. Especially if you’re thinking all the time about where’s it going to come from next? And you discover that the more you make plans and try to calculate on where it’s going to hit you next, you will always be outwitted because the teacher is infinitely clever and will always come from an unexpected direction.

So at last there arrives a point where you just give up. You stop planning. And you just go around, relaxed, and if it hits, it hits!

And then you’re ready to start fencing. Another story told about this is the story of the woodcutter and the animal, whose name was Satori. There was once a woodcutter working in a clearing in a forest, when he saw a strange animal peeking at him from behind a bush.

And, thinking to have this animal for dinner, he rushed at it with his axe. And the animal laughed from the opposite side of the clearing. Because this animal had the power to read thoughts.

And therefore, wherever the woodsman intended to go, the animal read his thought first. And so the animal began to talk, and mocked him and said, “You think I’m going to be [in] this place next,” because the woodsman naturally thought, “When I see him next, instead of going to where he is, I’ll go to the opposite side of the clearing.” And so this went on until the woodsman got absolutely furious, and he returned to chopping the wood. And the animal laughed and said, “So you’ve given up!” And just at that moment, as he whanged the axe against the tree, the head flew off and struck the animal dead.

That’s the way you have to attain Zen. So you see what happened here? The boy who studies swordsmanship is put in this impossible situation where he can’t do anything right.

Everything he does is wrong. And therefore, after finding this out—that nothing will do because it’s all self-conscious—he gives up. Then he can be spontaneous.

But you see, what is provided is the training—why the training of Zen people is disciplined is that, we’re going, first of all, to be spontaneous within limits. See, out in society you can’t do that. Because people will be just bugged by you if you say exactly what you feel and always act the truth.

You won’t be liked. And you may indeed do very dangerous things. But the Sōtō, or the Zen training school, is set up so it’s a walled-in situation where one is allowed to be spontaneous within certain limits.

And the crucial moment is what is called the sanzen interview, which is a restricted interview; it’s very formal. But in the climax of that interview no holds are barred. It is a personal interchange where fundamental honesty is the crux of the whole thing.

Now you see, as I explained last time, that is a very buggy situation. Because the more you wonder whether you’re going to be fundamentally honest, the more you get cold feet. Supposing you were allowed an interview with God, and allowed to ask one question, what would you ask?

And really think it over, you know? If you go into this and think, “What would I ask?” You know? It’s got to be really important.

It’s got to be the fundamental question to you. What is it that you basically want to know? And you start thinking about that, and thinking about that, and the more you think about it, the more you don’t know what you would ask.

You’d say, “Well that’s a silly question, isn’t it? I know what he would say to that.” You think about another one and think, “Eh, it’s a curiously interesting question; I don’t suppose anybody knows the answer to it. But after all, it’s only just idle curiosity.

I don’t think I’ll ask that one.” Then you think of another question, and think about that for a while, and then you realize it’s a question that doesn’t mean anything. That would be a waste of breath, and of a great opportunity. And you go through it, and through it, and through it, until you think about all the questions you might ask.

It’s the same—very much so—if you visit a great master. You know, you might get an interview with a Zen master while you’re here, and with the advantage of an interpreter present. What are you going to ask him?

You’ve got just this one chance. What do you want to know? I remember a friend of mine who went to Yamazaki Rōshi, who used to be at Shōkoku-ji.

He said—when he got in there—he said, “You know, I feel so silly.” He said, “I haven’t got any questions to ask you. I just feel like laughing.” And Yamazaki said, “Good! Let’s laugh!” And he broke into a great bellow.

And, you know, there it is. This is what I want to emphasize about this, because there are ever so many facets of Zen that are so easily misunderstood just through reading about it. There’s one school of people that will emphasize the spontaneity of it and think, “Gee, this Zen is real groovy stuff!

It means you just do anything you like.” It’s true, you see, that certain of the great Zen masters have said—Rinzai made this point very strongly—he said, “In Zen there is no place for discipline, or for Buddhism, or for making efforts. You just eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, move your bowels when nature calls. Fools will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.” See?

You read that. Next thing you know, somebody comes here to Japan to study Zen, and suddenly they write back letters about hours and hours of sitting in one position, and being banged about with warning sticks, and having to get up at ghastly four in the morning, and wash in cold water, and having a very spare diet, and having to do things, behave and move just exactly so, and all that side of it is emphasized. People think, what’s going on?

Is it this or is it that? Is it one thing or is it the other? The answer is it’s both.

It does have discipline, especially in view of the fact—and do bear this in mind: most Zen monks today are not really in the monastery of their own volition, and have not been for hundreds of years. They’ve been there because it was a family tradition. You’re a priest and you have a son; well, in all traditional cultures—in India, in China, and so on—there’s a tendency for the son to carry on his father’s business.

So if you’re the son of a priest it’s sort of expected that you’ll be one, too. So, off to the monastery with you. It was the same in England in the 18th century, where the oldest son in the family went into the army, the second son into the law—I forget which order it was—and the third son, anyway, went into the ministry.

Well, that means a whole lot of people were in theological school who haven’t got the slightest interest in religion. Not real interest. And so they have to be taught to think.

So St. Ignatius, for example, made out methods of meditation. A, B, C, D. Approximate consideration, remote consideration, the meditation itself, the resolution at the end—this is simply designed to teach people how to think who have never thought, and weren’t interested in thinking. So in much the same way, these things have occurred in the Far East.

And a great deal of it is therefore designed to discipline people who have no real motivation for the discipline in question; the study in question. So now, one of the great features of Zen training is to develop within yourself what is called a “great doubt.” And the kōan system is used to develop a great doubt. Here you are, you know; you’re asked to hear the sound of one hand.

If you’re an American and you come over to Japan to study Zen, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble. You obviously have some sincere motivation, and you just can’t get the answer to that “one hand” thing, and it becomes more a matter of life and death because it seems terribly important to find this out. So you have a great doubt; that is to say, you have an urgent spirit of inquiry.

And you can’t get it, and you can’t get it, and you can’t get it—the teacher keeps saying, “Now c’mon, c’mon, let’s go. Let’s be ready to give your life for this thing!” But you see, if you go into a Zen monastery and you don’t have that spirit of inquiry that led you across the ocean at a great deal of expense, you were just someone who was brought up—one of the boys in the neighborhood—and he went into the monastery. Well then the teacher says, “The trouble with you is you don’t have a great doubt.” Of course he doesn’t have a great doubt; he’s not interested.

So he learns to cultivate a great doubt. See, it’s like trying to—if I may put it in Western or Christian terminology: you don’t love God. You’ve never seen him, you don’t know anything about God.

How—why the devil would you love God? Somebody comes along and says, “You’ve got to love God, you know! It’s terribly important.

It’s the first commandment.” “Oh, gee, I’ve got to love God!” So what do we do? We sit down and say, “Dear God, I love you. Dear God, I love you.

Dear God, I love you. Dear God, I love you. C’mon, c’mon, I’ve got to get this feeling going.” And then the preacher can tell all sorts of stories, you see, and move you; terrify you with the fear of hell if you don’t love God.

Or he could say how beautiful Jesus was. That was the revelation of God. Now, you ought to love that!

Like you ought to love your mother (…probably hate her guts). So you see, you get this thing. Work on that great doubt.

Well, you see, the trouble is you can’t get a great doubt to order. You can’t tell anybody anything to order. If you could, do you know [what would happen]?

Supposing you were at music school. What are they trying to do in music school? They’re trying to find methods for teaching creative musicianship.

Whether you’re a player, or whether you’re a composer, or whatever. They want to find out how they can make every student a genius. Actually, all schools are run for the advantage of the staff.

And, you know, it’s a job. You’ve got to put people through there; it’s a way of keeping them off the labor market. But if you’re a very sincere teacher you want to find out how to impart that subtle thing to the student.

So there are books galore on methods—special methods—for getting that creative ability across. Professor So-And-So’s method, Doctor So-And-So’s method, et cetera, playing the piano, and so on, make it easy but make him a genius. Now, if such a method existed, you know what would happen?

These geniuses would all be boring. Because we would know how they do it. And the whole fascination of an art, and of a great performance, is you don’t know how it’s done.

There must be something about it that is fundamentally astonishing. So, in this way, what there is—fundamentally; basic reality—knows itself and doesn’t know itself. If it did know itself thoroughly it would stop.

Like playing games. If you know the outcome of a game for sure there’s no point playing it. So, you know, when master chessplayers sit down and it becomes apparent—although there are still many pieces on the board—that one of them is going to mate in three moves, they abandon the game because they know the outcome.

If you knew the future perfectly, you knew everything you’re going to do right up to the day of your death, you’d say, “Let’s check out on this game. Let’s commit suicide and start another life.” Because there’s no point living through what is known completely. Of course, you can’t very well live through what is unknown completely; there must be some light.

But total light annihilates itself. So then, you see, there is no prescription. No infallible technique for teaching anybody music, although there are music schools.

And there is, likewise, no infallible technique for teaching anybody Zen, although indeed there are Zen schools. And sometimes the teacher, who is many years experienced, begins to gets disillusioned. What’s the point of all these schools; what’s the point of teaching music?

You can’t teach music. You can only pass it on from one person to another by osmosis. Sure, there’s a technique.

You can learn how to read, you can learn how to put your fingers on the banjo—but the real thing, what to do with that technique, what to say with it—you can’t teach that. So one assumes, then, that a person who is sufficiently motivated, who is fond of music, will learn the technique because he wants to get so where he can handle the instruments. And you suppose, likewise, that a person who is really interested in self-knowledge—after all, Zen is only a certain way of self-knowledge—will master certain techniques because he’s interested.

But, you see, all schools and all systems begin to make techniques an end in themselves, because technique is the only thing you can teach. You can’t teach the thing. Now, you see, we get scared when we think of that.

Do you mean to say I might be that person who gets hung up in this? And all I’m going to get out of this school is technique? Somehow I might be that dumb bunny who just doesn’t get this thing?

That’s an awful thought, isn’t it? Because that’s drilled into us from childhood; for example, it comes out in toilet training. I remember all medical and nursing authorities, when I was a small boy, had tremendous constipation phobia, and they believed that you could suffer from poisoning, you know, from retaining things too long.

And so they were always, always agitating, questioning every day as to whether you had been. So you built up, conversely, a terror that you might not be able to. And this, in its turn, built up tensions that were actually constipating.

And so everybody was constantly being filled with cáscara sagrada, California syrup of figs, castor oil—bombshells in every description, which upset the natural functionings. So, in the same way, you might think, “I’m going to practice meditations or something, and study Zen. But will I be the poor fool who never gets the point?” Or you could put it in Christian terms and say, “Well, I’ll be as good as I can be, but perhaps I will be the one whom God will never give any real grace to, because I haven’t been picked out.

And will I get this grace?” There’s no way, you see, that you can wrangle grace. You can’t compel the Lord to give it. In the same way you can’t compel satori to happen.

You think, “Maybe it won’t happen to me.” That’s possible, you see. So what do you do about that? Well, the teachers have all sorts of things to say about what to do about it.

They say, “Well, now look: just forget about it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get it.” Not getting it is getting it, you see? They use this paradox all the time.

Not to have it—really, to accept that you don’t have it—that’s getting it; that’s the real point, you see? But that’s a gimmick. See, I’m going to try as hard as I can not to try to get it.

See? But you’re really playing a game. At last, I’ve got the infallible method!

There must be an infallible method, because if there isn’t a method we’re lost; we’re up the creek! Why? Because we’re out of control.

But, you see, when you find out there isn’t a method—there isn’t a positive method and there isn’t a negative method—what are you going to do? You can’t do something and you can’t do nothing. You can’t let go of the thing because, after all, you got curious about it.

And this is what’s called having swallowed a ball of hot iron. You can’t gulp it down and you can’t spit it out. And Zen is a trap to get you into that state.

You be very careful how you get mixed up with the thing, because you may end up in a padded cell, blathering. That is the quandary, and that’s why ever-silly opposite things can be said about Zen. That’s why, on the one hand, it can be said rightly that it’s a strong discipline, while on the other hand it can be said rightly that it’s not a discipline at all.

And it isn’t that it’s just a mixture of things. Zen isn’t sort of partly discipline and partly spontaneity. Whatever is said about it can be said of all of it.

And therefore it seems to be paradoxical. And one can always get into difficulty by neglecting some side of it and saying, “Well, that doesn’t matter.” Sometimes it’s true that it doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s not true; it may be just the thing that you need—the side you say that doesn’t matter.

So there’s no way—what I’m trying to say is: there’s no way of putting your finger on this thing. There’s no way of nailing it down, and that’s the whole point. Because, you see, fundamentally, Zen makes you do what you were doing all the time, only it makes you do it consistently.

Supposing you’re sitting in your padded cell and you suddenly found out this little game. See? You’ve got your one hand clasped by the other and your thumb sticking out here, at the top.

You look at that thumb and say, “Ooh, look at that”—whoops! And then try and catch it. Now you’ve got it—no.

No. Here we go! No.

No. C’mon, let’s get it! C’mon, let’s get it!

C’mon, let’s get it! Get it, get it, get it! Get that thing!

Get that—see? Whew. That’s what we’re doing, see?

Here’s me, and here’s knowing about me. No, I want to try and control myself, you see? I want to get a hold of that thing that’s me.

Because when I get a hold of it I can control it, and then I’m going to be alright. Gotta get a hold of it. And so we’re doing that.

And as a result we have astounding illusions. Now, we have the illusion because it’s ruled into us through acculturation that each one of us is a separate ego, separate center of awareness, little living pulp of some kind, that lives in a strange world. Scares the hell out of us.

What makes you think this, you see? How did you ever come to imagine that you are somehow disconnected, out there, surrounded by this world in which you’re a stranger? See, it’s really obvious that that isn’t so—only, it’s not obvious to most people.

It’s really obvious that you—the real you, deep in—is this thing that is reality. And that you’re having a profoundly interesting game pretending you’re not. And you’re going through all kinds of amazing mazes to play this game, and mostly running in terror from your own shadow.

Jumping at the sound of your own heartbeat. Having goosepimples rise on your back at the sound of your own footsteps. Wow!

And you are always exploring into this world and finding it gets stranger and stranger as you look out into the infinitudes of space, where you thought everything was pretty rational—you know, these other galaxies that were millions of light years away—you thought, “Well, that’s just a lot of galaxies out there.” Suddenly, something called a quasar turns up. Nobody understands what a quasar is; they defy all the things that we thought we knew. And so it get stranger and stranger.

And the more you probe inwardly—you know, you sort of lift the skin off your own stomach and take a look inside. What a weird world that is. And we say, “Oohw, cover that up!

That makes me feel…” I feel like I feel when I see spiders, or ants, or something. You get the shivers and the creeps from it. But, you see, what you’re getting the creeps at is yourself in an unfamiliar aspect.

The unknown side. Because at last comes recognition. The most far out thing, the thing that seems the most totally other—and you say, “Why, that’s me!” And what a relief.

But at the same time: what fun to begin all over again and have a new surprise, something different. The subject which has most interested me for many, many years is the simple question: who or what am I? What do we mean by the word “I”?

And I find (as I investigate this question and talk with all kinds of people) that, generally speaking, the word “I” refers to something that we sense or experience as a center of consciousness and decision, living somewhere inside a bag of skin. Common speech reflects this in many ways. We say, “Face facts.” We talk about being confronted with reality, and we talk about the difference between the knower and the known, the subjective and the objective, the internal thinker and feeler facing an external world.