We'll repeat the address later. I was explaining that the Mahayana Buddhism was India's principal export to the civilization of Asia. And that, quite basically, it's an attitude to life based on complete known fear, or you could call it not clinging to things. It's based on the realization that you are not just your organism, your physical body, or your own particularized psyche, but that you, even if you don't know it consciously, that is, you don't know consciously how to grow your hair, you are fundamental reality, which is beyond any limitation of time or space,

[01:30]

You are it. You are what there is. The kingdoms have a symbol for this thing that they call the Brahman or the Atman, the Self. The Buddhists simply modify this by saying, if you have a symbol of it, which is something you believe in, as one might say, believe in God, or believe in heaven, or life after death, or in an immortal soul, The fact that you believe is still an act of attachment or cling, which is unnecessary. And so an unnecessary thing is what we would call yielding the lily, or they use a wonderful phrase in Zen Buddhism, putting the eggs on the snake. Now legs embarrass the snake. It needs the eggs. And yoke kills the lily. So the Buddhists have worked out a religion of no religion.

[02:35]

That is to say, of not believing in anything at all. Not because they believe that reality is nothing, but because the believing is unnecessary. It's gilding the building. So this was the fundamental idea of this morning's lecture. Now, I want to go on this afternoon to put some of this in a kind of systematic and historical perspective so that you all know where we are in time and space and what all this is about and how it came to be. Though the funny thing is that the Indians have no good sense of history whatsoever. This is one of the fundamental gripes of Western scholars, that when they read all the documents of Indian literature, there is no historical consciousness from England.

[03:38]

And so you don't know what period it comes from. To begin with, they didn't start writing it down until about two centuries BC, maybe a little before. Prior to that, everything was transmitted already. And nobody had the faintest idea how far back it goes. The average educated guess today is that the Upanishads go back to about 800 BC. They are the poems which represent the standpoint of Vedanta. Vedanta means anta, almost our word end or completion, of Veda. Veda is our word video, videri, to see, live, is knowledge.

[04:39]

And so the most ancient scriptures of India are called Veda, or vision, you see, and they are poems in a mythological form, and the Upanishads constitute veda-anta, that is to say, the conclusion of the vision, when they tell you the secret, the inner meaning that underlies the mythology. So let us assume that the most educated guess of scholars today is that the texts called the Vedas are about 1500 B.C., and the texts published around from approximately 800 to considerably later. uh... eight hundred to uh... at least one hundred and some even later than that but the major Upanishads such as the Bhridhartha, the Aranyaka the Kena Upanishad, the Isha Upanishad, the Mandukya Upanishad, all those are relatively early so they would be anywhere from eight hundred to uh... six hundred

[05:51]

prior to the time of the Buddha. But still, you see, we are very vague about when all this started. Because the Vedic tradition was brought to India from somewhere in Central Asia. The Aryans who constitute the castes, the ruling People of India have done so for hundreds and hundreds of years, came from somewhere to the north, and have common ancestry, linguistically, with our European languages. But they have no sense of history. If you write a story about a certain king, He was involved with a certain sage. You alter the name of the king.

[06:54]

Every time you recall the story, you simply make him the king at the present time, but then it becomes relevant. So nobody knows. The Jews, on the other hand, had a sense of history. And they're very particular about when and where and what happened. So it's far easier. to make clear dates about the Old Testament and compare them with archaeological remains than it is with anything from India. This nation, India is a tropical country where everything decays very quickly. It is a kind of swarming, lively, slimy turnover of life. So no one can be sure when all was started. So even Buddhism being a relatively late phenomenon out of Indian culture, the dates are a little bit more certain than they are with Hinduism.

[08:04]

So we know that Gautama the Buddha lived shortly after 600 B.C. But we are very, very uncertain as to what he taught. There are two great sections of Buddhist scriptures. One is written in the Pāri language and the other in Sanskrit, although most of the Sanskrit texts no longer exist and have to be studied in either Tibetan or Chinese translations. Western scholars are largely of the opinion that the Pali books represent more definitely the authentic teaching of the Buddha than the Sanskrit ones. Although there's room for debate on this still.

[09:10]

Pali is a sort of colloquial South Indian form of Sanskrit. For example, if you say Nirvana in Sanskrit, you say Nidana in Pali. If you say Kama in Sanskrit, you say Kama in Pali. So all southern Buddhists, Theravadins, Ilyas, make the Pani texts their authority. And the earliest Pali texts that we have are written on strips of palm leaves, like those, just about so long, with characters that look like almost all of them are indistinguishable from the figure eight unless you look very closely. And they have holes in the middle of the leaves so they can be strung together and set between two boards of wood. Well, now, when you look at this record of the Buddha's teaching, you raise questions and ask no human being sitting around in conversation with other people, whatever I'm struggling to say.

[10:27]

It simply is not natural conversation. What it is, is a highly tabulated form of instruction, tabulated in order to be memorized. So that it's easy to remember things if you classify them under 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. So there are, Buddhism is all numbers. There are three characteristics of being. Dukkha, sattri, anitya, impermanence, anatman, no self. There are four steps. There are four noble truths. There are eight stages of the noble eightfold path. There are ten fetters. There are twelve elements of the chain of dependent origination. Everything is number. And this, therefore, takes us back to a time before writing when everything had to be committed to memory.

[11:37]

Now, it is conceivable that if I were going to talk to you, and I was going to examine you later, to be sure that you'd understood everything I said, that I would number my remarks and say what you remember first did, second that, third that. And I would talk back to you and say, what was the first thing? What was the second thing? What was the third thing? But the style of those Pali scriptures is so artificial, and everything is repeated again and again and again. So that it's quite obviously something that monks did and put together on a wet afternoon with nothing better to look at. It is terribly boring and I simply don't advise anybody except a serious scholar who wants to call it all out and get the results ever to bother reading the Pali scriptures. The advantage of the Christians, you see, is they have this inadvertently beautiful English Bible translated under the reign of King James.

[12:46]

And it is so exquisitely done that the Jews were great poets. And it is very reasonable. Buddhist scriptures are boring to the extreme. With exceptions. So there is this body of Pali literature which is called kīptitaka. Kīptitaka means three baskets. Because the Pali manuscripts were stored in baskets. And three big baskets constitute the tradition of Hinayana or Theravada Buddhism. In addition to this, there is the Mahayana calendar. body of scriptures, which is one of the single biggest others of literature in the world. It is somewhat larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. And the official edition existing today is called Taishō Gaizōkyō, which is a Japanese edition of the Chinese texts, and the other is called the Kanjō

[14:01]

Pangyo, which is the Tibetan edition, but that's not so easily come by. But the standard edition with the Taisho Daizoku is a great, vast collection of volumes, all in Chinese, translated into Sanskrit scriptures. Now, again, the general opinion of scholars is that the Mahayana sutras are from a later time, than the Buddha. Grading, the important text in this collection, grades in origin from 100 BC, approximately, to about 400 AD. And so, according to the standards of Western scholarship, these are forgeries. They are attributed to the Buddha, but actually composed by individuals living a lot later.

[15:05]

Now our morals, our literary morals, would say this was forgery and that had a bad intent. But this is a modern idea. If we go back to Western scriptures, for example, we'll see a book in the Apocrypha called The Wisdom of Solomon. The Song of Psalms attributed to Solomon. The Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament attributed to Solomon. It is absolutely inconceivable that Solomon wrote these books. The Book of Deuteronomy is attributed to Moses. It is absolutely impossible that Moses wrote the Book of Deuteronomy. Now, why is this attributed to Moses? Because the actual writer of this book, what he wanted to give it in his own name, And he would therefore say, I feel that I have been into a center of my consciousness that is beyond me.

[16:11]

And I am reporting things from a level of my being which I cannot claim as my own. Therefore, I have to ascribe the authorship to a person who is archetypal. Solomon represents wisdom. So that certain Hebrew writers at a certain period of history, when they felt that they were in touch with real wisdom, would feel it immoral to say, I, Ishmael ben Ezra, would put this thought in my own name, or in a country that would be very modest. I say this was a revelation from Solomon. In those days, the thought copyrighted. you know, but considerably the ethical thing to do. So in exactly the same way, when Indian Buddhists living not after the Buddha, living say in the University of Nalanda around the beginning of the Christian era or later, no, Nalanda is later than that, Nalanda takes us to 200 A.D.,

[17:27]

Specifically to a man called Nagarjuna, who lived about 280, who was the big genius of the whole Mahayana movement. We don't know whether Nagarjuna wrote the scriptures he commented on, or only wrote the commentaries. And there's a huge body of literature In Sanskrit, and it's known to us mainly through its Tibetan and Chinese translations, called Prajnaparamita. Prajnaparamita means intuitive wisdom, paramita, for going across. That is to say, to the other shore. Wisdom to cross into the other shore. And almost all of this literature has been translated into Indian by Edward Cowherly. I could get it in his, you can get selections from it in this book, which is now available in paperback, in the Harper-Toch book series.

[18:31]

Buddhist texts through the ages. For the average person who does not want to be a specialist scholar, that wants to get a good idea of what all of this is about, this is it. This has excellent collections from all types of Buddhist literature, and especially this class. And it is conceivable that Nagarjuna wrote the scriptures in the name of the Buddha, and others did too. But they were simply, by their standards, too modest to say. is divine. They are saying it comes from a deeper level of consciousness than my ego, and therefore is the buddhism. Now, you see, in our morals, that's forgery. In their morals, it's not.

[19:32]

So, in Buddhism, you don't have the same problem that you have in Christianity. In Christianity, We want to know what were the very words of Jesus and what was the late edition because the authority is so peculiarly involved in the historical Jesus. In Buddhism this is not the case. The Buddhists in general feel that Buddhism is like a tree. Buddha planted the seed and later the tree grows. Very definitely. You see, in Christianity, Jesus is the only incarnation of God. The Christians, Orthodox Christians, will on the whole argue there will never be, there was never, another incarnation of God. But in Buddhism, it is of the essence of the thing that Buddhas can appear in the world again and again and again

[20:44]

any one of you can become a Buddha. So there isn't this fastening of authority to a particular historical time and place. So then, the Buddhist scriptures represent, although they are all attributed to the Buddha, they represent an uncovering of questions which the Buddha raised. Now for this purpose, it's important to understand one thing that is not made clear in almost all books on Buddhism, whatever. Buddhism is absolutely fundamentally a dialogue. And this dialogue between a teacher and an inquirer is quite different from an authoritative phenomenon.

[21:59]

There are no teachings of Buddhism. Everything you will find stated as a teaching of Buddhism It's actually a question of feeling. Let's go to a very fundamental point. What can you do not with suffering? Because after all, suffering is the problem. That's what we mean by the whole idea of a problem. I suffer. I have a problem. So if you don't like suffering, you say, how do I not suffer? And you know you're a wise guy. And say, I will change. I'm anxious, I'm afraid, I only live that many hours, how do I not do it? So the Buddha answered this question, you suffer because you deny it. If you didn't desire, your desires would never be frustrated and so you wouldn't suffer. So, what would happen if you didn't desire?

[23:11]

Now this is not a teaching, it is not saying, you ought not to desire. It is a request for making an experiment. Could you possibly not desire? So the inquirer goes away and he makes this experiment. He sees, can I possibly get rid of my desires? And he discovers in the course of making this experiment that he is desiring to get rid of his desire. And so he returns to the teacher and says, it is impossible not to desire. Because even trying not to desire, I'm desiring. And the teacher says, you're getting warmer. Yep, yep, yep. You see, in every respect, everything that the Buddha ever suggested that his followers should do was by nature of an experiment.

[24:17]

Buddhism never uttered its final teaching, what it was actually after. All it described are various experiments you can make to get on the road to it. So it is of the nature of it that it is a dialogue. Indeed, many of the books of the Pali scriptures are called dialogues of the book. So this is very, very important to understand, that all these records and scriptures are interconnected. One of the first things, for example, that when I was a starting to study Buddhism in my team, I met a wonderful Japanese Sanskrit professor, and he explained to me, Buddha taught three kinds of things. Dukkha, the world of unity and suffering, and Nitya, impermanence, and not the moved-out self.

[25:23]

And he said, Buddha teach dukkha, to counteract wrong views, The whole idea, you can't say what the truth is. So there is no dogma. All you do is you get going a dialogue, the effect of which is to counterbalance people's wrong view or partial view. All Buddhism is view, the way you look at it. See? So the first step of the Noble Eightfold Path is called Samyak Drishti, which means Samyak Perfect.

[26:31]

Our word sum, summation, comes eventually from the Sanskrit sum jack. Perfect view. There's a wonderful story about Suzuki was giving a course on Buddhism at the University of Hawaii. And he was going through the whole of the truth. He got the fourth one. And he was sort of lazing around on a hot afternoon with a group of students. half asleep because he isn't popping as an old man. And he said, the surest step of no-borrowing folk path is sure-kind, meaning a right view, complete view. Auditorism is view. You have a right view, you have auditorism. A right view is no special view. So I told this story to Morimoto Roshiki in Kyoto, and he said, First step of Noble Eightfold Path.

[27:57]

In Japanese, Shō Ken, Shō means correct, Ken means view. He said, is... So... What you have to understand then is simply that you can't look up the teachings of Buddhism in the same way that you could look up the teachings of Hegel, Kant, Spinoza, Jesus Christ, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and so on. They don't exist. They've never been written down. All that has been written down is the dialogue that leads up to the understanding. Somebody raised the question in this morning's discussion about whether you needed other people. It was you.

[28:58]

And in a way you do, because this is the need of the guru. And the guru is not necessarily somebody who is a qualified master. The guru is something against which you dance. It may be a book, it may be your own reflection in the mirror. Said I to myself, said I. This dialogue is the way in prison. You've been listening to Alan Watts with part two from the seminar Solid Emptiness. If you'd like a cassette copy of this... We don't know what we think. Well, that gives people the hippity. They can't stand to be that insecure. Therefore, at this time, you see, when everything is under question, certain types of people rush for security. Let's have that firm dogma.

[30:02]

Tell us what to believe. And so people go in for believing in the, you see, the Roman Catholic Church up to the time of Pope John. was getting, the height of it was actually, they were getting more and more obscurantists. The last thing they did was to make it a dogma that the Virgin Mary zoomed up bodily into heaven. Literally. Because they were working on this theory that the success of the church is in becoming as obscurantist as possible. Don't give an inch. This is the attitude of Cardinal Baccaliani. Don't give an inch to modernism, liberalism, street-thinkingism, scientism, anything. Stick to the old dogma.

[31:02]

Because if you will believe that, it shows that you're tough-minded. You don't have any truckery with vagueness. that watering down the gospel, see? Look how they use all this terminology, watering it down. So that if you believe it that literal way, you can pat yourself on the back and say, I am a strong fellow, I'm gutsy. But the old wise Pope John, you know, suddenly realized that this wasn't working. And that some very serious thinking had to be done about the Church's opposition. And they now, because of Pope John, they took themselves out on a limb. And there's something that's got to happen about birth control, about relationship to not only other Christian denominations, but to other religions. Everybody's expecting it, and if they don't come through, the Church is going to lose faith serendipitously. So I'm proposing a few ideas that will help them to achieve this.

[32:06]

The difficulty is indeed for Christians that they like to emphasize the importance of distinction. And they always criticize Hindus because Hindus says everything is ultimately one. That's not exactly what Hindus say. They say something a good bit more subtle than that. They say it's non-dual. But if I may, I said I was going to tell fairy tales, so I'm going to keep the simple language. We're not going into philosophical subtleties. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, the Hindu do say that everything is ultimately one. Everything is finally the self of the universe, provided that they're one. The Christians say about that, that's a very dangerous thing, a very bad attitude.

[33:20]

Because the Christian would say, if everything is one, then that destroys all values. It means that the good is the same as the evil, ultimately. That it'll all come out in a wash. That the villain is just as good as the hero. That disease is really the same thing as health. That crime is the same as virtue. And that there is really the distinctions between values that draw us or between people, thou and I, aren't really important. Because in the end, we all end up realizing we're the same. Now, it's true. There is a very great value in distinctions. When they said, you know, that our problem isn't really very much difference between women and men, somebody says, because that's the joy of women and men being different.

[34:33]

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

[35:39]

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

[36:50]

Even battles, even when we go to fight to the death about whether you're right or I'm right, We can't engage in this battle unless we have something in common. We must have a field of battle to be allowed and to be agreed to have a battle. And you can't have a battle between the tiger and the shark because they have nothing in common. They are different elements. So under all conflict, under the warfare between the Lord and Lucifer, there must be something in common. But Christianity doesn't admit that publicly. The devil is wrong, wrong, wrong. And he has nothing to do with it. He out of his own perverse

[37:58]

uppity damnable malicious mind invented you and there would never never be any restitution the devil damned himself eternally delivered the minute he in the beginning of time did the first evil thing there was no excuse for it no medication nothing he is out and if you join forces with the devil you're out too That's the good old aptitude. Whereas on the contrary, Hinduism is based on the idea of dramatics. And that means its view of the universe is basically playful. A drama is a play. The stage is divided from the auditorium by the proscenium arch, and that arch says anything that happens behind this arch isn't serious.

[39:08]

It's only a play. And so when the hero stabs the villain, you know that that's a sword in which the blade shoots up into the hammer with a spring on it, and it doesn't really stab him. The great actor is the one who gets the audience on the edge of their chairs with anxiety and suspense because he almost persuades them that it isn't a play at all. Now that's the Hindu idea. That the audience is the law and the actor is the law. And the law has acted so well that he has deceived himself, and that just forgetting gets in the way. He has, however, way, way in the back of his mind what the Germans call a hintergerd, which means a hidden suspicion.

[40:15]

It's a big act. And every one of you has that hintergerd. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to have the courage to go on with it. Think, you really don't confess it to yourself at all. And some people, it's the very general to get them to admit it, where they defend themselves against saying, you know, that this isn't real, that the light is clay. Oh, you couldn't say that light is clay. And So you see the actor is there on the stage trying to convince the audience that it isn't a play after all. After a while, the audience will thrill. Then the actor go back to the green room behind the scene.

[41:17]

There in the green room, everybody takes off his mask and his costume. and stops playing roles and assumes his ordinary self. The actor in the green room becomes again the common man. Who do you suppose the common man is? Now we've degraded the meaning of the common man. Today the common man means any average moron. The real meaning of the common man is the man capital M who is common to us all the man we all have in common in other words the Atman the self the Adam Kadmon the one that we all are you know on one big sow many tits through which milk comes so on one big cosmos many persons through which the light of consciousness comes so

[42:21]

Back in the dream room, Hamlet comes to common land. And, of course, they may retire there, and then they come out just before taking off their costumes. They come and try to have a curtain call. And then the audience applauds. They applaud the hero, and they applaud the villain. Because the villain did a good show of being the villain. And it wouldn't have been a play unless there had been a villain. Because all plays have essentially a cinema clock. You have a status quo, everybody getting along all right, and then somebody comes in and makes a mess of it. The villain. And the whole thrill of the play is, what do we do with what the villain did? How do we solve the problem that the villain proposed? So in the cosmic thing, if you read Jewish mythology, you will realize that the devil, the Satan, who was originally called, was the district attorney in the court of heaven, the prosecutor.

[43:30]

And he was the one who went around and grabbed a whole lot of angels and other creatures and accused them before the throne of God and said, that fellow doesn't really believe in you. The whole book of Job is about this. That Satan is not the Christian devil in the book of Job. Satan in the book of Job is the lowest servant of the Lord of Heaven. He's not yet become the enemy of God. But you see, the man who is the prosecutor always makes himself unpopular. The audience, not the underdog. And when you read murder trials, don't you always have a sneaking hope that the man will get off? He didn't really do it. Don't you always tend in such a situation to take a side against the district attorney? So it was, poor district attorney of heaven became unpopular. And he got demoted to being the Christian devil.

[44:34]

But in the book of Job, The idea is that the devil raises a doubt about Job's loyalty. And he says to the Lord, you think that's a great guy you've created there, and that he really loves you and is really faithful. I'll tell you he's not faithful. You just make him suffer, make him sleep. Then you'll see what kind of a trickery, what a mess he was. But the devil lost the wager. Job remained loyal. You can't understand the Book of Joey unless you see it in the light of that kind of court scene on the line. So the Hindu has taken the position that nothing in this universe is really serious. And the Christian is taking the position quite opposed to that that it really is terribly serious and you better watch out and they can do things they're wonderful dear lord you are going to scare me to the limit won't you you better scare yourself in me but I am going to

[46:04]

Play it cool. You can come on with all your thunders. And it may be in the form of prophets and priests who rave from the pulpit, a grand inquisitor. It may be in the form of diseases, plague, pestilences, and chants. You're going to make this universe seem very real to me. But shall we have a bet? That's what it is about. He says, I don't believe you. You're kidding. Now, for the Christian, you see, that's an awful threat to take. Terrifying. Would you outface the Lord at the gambling table? He's got the perfect poker face. He's got a hand full of money. You hold all the aces. But the Lord is looking at you as if he had a better hand than that.

[47:09]

He will outpace you to the limit to help you play the game, to give you the game. Only your blood, and you calling the Lord's blood. You've been listening to Alan Watts with Part 1 from the Seminar Beyond Theology. If you'd like a cassette copy of this lecture, send $9 to MEA Box 303, Sausalito, 94965. Be sure to specify Part 1 for the Seminar Beyond Theology. The address again, MEA Box 303, Sausalito, 94965, California. regardless of that very clearly presented address.

[48:00]

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