Well then, we are continuing with the subject of Mahayana Buddhism. And in the last seminar, I discussed almost entirely the school of Mahayana which is known as Madhyamaka in Sanskrit, this word meaning approximately the middle way. Madhyamaka has been called in the best books that there is on the subject the central philosophy of Buddhism and is not what we call in the West a philosophy at all. It's a method for changing your state of consciousness.

[01:09]

In other words, it's not a system of ideas such as propounded, say, by Plato or by Kant or by Hegel. It's a dialectical method. That is to say, dialectic being the sense of a discourse between the teacher and the student. the purpose of which is not to explain or inculcate a certain set of ideas, but to change one's basic state of feeling. That is to say, to change the sensation that you have of your own existence. All Buddhism is concerned with this. The very crux of Buddhism, the thing that is called bodhi, B-O-D-H-I, which means awakening, it comes from the same root as the word Buddha. B-O-D-H, or B-U-D-H, is to know, but better to be awakened.

[02:18]

You know, some of you have probably told yourselves to the teachings of Gurjit, the wonderful old rascal, who used to give lectures in which he would keep completely silent for a while and get everybody embarrassed. And they were all expecting something to happen, and he would look individually at everybody in the group And when everybody was feeling awkward, he would say, wake up! You're all asleep. And if you don't wake up, I won't give any lecture. And this is a very good attitude, actually. Zen, as you know, uses shock tactics of various kinds. The whole idea then is that a person who is under illusion, maya, thinks of himself basically as a victim, someone caught in a trap, somebody subject to fate.

[03:50]

the will of God, or whatever you want to call it, who got involved in life passively. That's why I use the word victim. And he has this, therefore, the sensation of his consciousness as being a kind of passive but nevertheless very delicate and tender receptor or percipient of everything that goes on, so that life in general occurs to you, it happens to you, and there's nothing you can do about it. And you say, well, it's awful. I can't get myself out of this trap. So the technique... of the philosophical dialogue that I was describing as the Madhyamaka is to get you to drop your defences.

[05:01]

In other words, you can discover as practically a physical sensation, that you tend to be on the defensive all the time. You are exerting through every muscle, practically, a resistance against the world, all of which is excessive. In other words, you need a certain resistance, you need a certain muscular tonus. But your body does that for you. You don't need to will it. It's like if you lie on the floor and relax, you don't need to do anything to hold yourself together. The floor will hold you up, and your skin will hold you inside. But most people are actually doing things to hold themselves together, even in this situation of complete relaxation, because they don't really trust their own life.

[06:13]

And that is the lack of trust in one's own life, the perpetual attitude of defensiveness, is a result of a kind of misfeeling of one's own existence as something alien to the universe that endures, as I said, and is simply a passive recipient of experience. So then, the whole process of a therapeutic dialogue, which was invented by the marvellous man Nagarjuna in the following of the Buddha, because it's a strange thing that the Buddha was very, very creative towards other people, that is to say. The basic idea of Buddhism does not preclude other people being just as much Buddha as Buddha was.

[07:24]

There's a little difficulty in Christianity about this, you see, because everybody harks back to Christ as the unique and only incarnation of God. And so he is on a very special pedestal which nobody else is ever allowed to climb up on. And this, of course, makes the teaching and work of Jesus completely ineffective. But Buddhism had the advantage that they never did that, and so that Nagarjuna, who could come later than Buddha, was in a way a wiser man than the Buddha himself, but only because he stood on the shoulders of Buddha and carried the Buddha's dialogue to its full conclusion, not its full conclusion, but to a full conclusion, we can go further today. You see, this thing hasn't stopped at all. It isn't something that we go back to as a past and say, well, we're going to tell you all about a thing called Buddhism.

[08:38]

which is a fixed body of practices and beliefs in which certain people in Asia believe. And if you're interested, you can believe in it too. It's not like that at all. It's an activity that is going on. And when it gets mixed up in the context of Western civilization, Western science, Western technology, will do things that the ancient people never dreamed of and might not even approve of. So it's very important in approaching this. This is one of our difficulties, you see. If I were a lecturer on Buddhism in the context of the academic world, I would have to observe certain game rules. That is to say, I would have to discuss the subject as entirely historical, as something of the past, and I would be expected to give you extremely accurate information about what it was, what other people thought and what they did.

[09:49]

The moment I began to suggest that this thing had any vitality to it and might have some effect upon you, I would be ruled out as academically unrespectable. They would say, well, this man is no longer qualified to be a professor because he is advocating these things and not taking an objective point of view to it. You see, it's very funny. All obsolete subjects are studied by the historical method. So if you study in the university religion, it comes under the heading of the history of religions. Philosophy, the introductory course in philosophy is usually history of philosophy. Just imagine teaching children mathematics with the introductory course, history of mathematics, so that they would start doing sums in Egyptian and Roman numerals. and going through all the procedures that ancient man went through to arrive at modern mathematics.

[10:54]

Imagine a first course in medicine. They proceed immediately to practical matters, the most up-to-date knowledge of human physiology, and they teach that. Only when you become a graduate school in the history of medicine do you run across an elective course in the history of medical science. So... This way of putting everything at a distance of history is a way of castrating it, making it completely ineffective so that it won't do anything anymore. So that's why I, for example, cannot work in the academic world. Because although I know their game rules and how to study Buddhism from the historical method, when you get involved in that after a while, nobody's interested. It just becomes completely boring. You can acquire yourself a huge library and you can go into the facts endlessly.

[11:57]

And then what? But the thing that the academicians can console themselves with is that one thing they are very much afraid of is a teacher of religion who's out to convert people. Because that, you see, is imposing upon you a particular individual and subjective point of view. So if, in other words, a person who is teaching Christianity should start preaching from his academic chair instead of just saying what Christians did and so on and such and such a period, they would be very frightened of that.

[13:01]

But the advantage that a Buddhist has is that he has no opinions that he is trying to put over on them. He's only trying to help you to get rid of your opinions. That is to say, to get rid of any fixed view of the world and of yourself. Because we use what are called views in Sanskrit, drishti, as methods of... clinging to existence. So there is something that is called in Sanskrit sakaya drishti, s-a-k-a-y-a, sakaya drishti, which means the view of separateness, the view of your being, this thing that I was talking about, the separate insular

[14:09]

recipient of experience, say, you have feelings. But the language that we speak compels you to say, you have feelings, as if you were something on the one hand and your feelings were something else on the other. You say, you have thoughts, as if the thinker stands on the one hand and inspects the thoughts on the other. so that one has a view of life in which there is a panorama of thoughts, of feelings, of sensations going along constantly. But one can say constantly because of the impression that you are distinct from them, standing aside from them as the constant inspector of the procession. And so you get the feeling that you endure, but precariously, threateningly, while the procession of thoughts and feelings goes by you.

[15:20]

Now, you can very easily see that this is the result of the memory process, which gives an illusion of constancy in the flow. And therefore, in the same way that the famous old Buddhist analogy, when you rotate a burning brand in the darkness, you give the illusion of a continuous circle of fire because of the memory in the retina. where the impression of the spark doesn't fade out immediately, but lingers. And so, as you see this thing in front of your eye, it seems to form a circle, whereas there is no circle, there is only a moment, the instant of flame.

[16:26]

So Buddhists argue there is only this moment. And actually, You who come in at the door are not the same people who are now sitting here. Just as in the whirlpool, in water, there is no constant water. There is only going on a continuous behavior, whirling in the water, but no water stays in it. So in exactly the same way, you who came in to the door a few minutes ago, and are now sitting here, are entirely different. Only, you are clinging to the idea of your continuity. Actually, there is only the moment, the instant, what is called in Sanskrit the kshana, k-s-a-n-a, kshana,

[17:38]

Life is instantaneous. And if you see that, you get a kind of a new angle on St. Paul's famous pronouncement, that we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. on the morning when the last trumpet sounds. You see, the Christian has put everything into chronology, that there is going to be a thing called the last day, and the trumpet of the angels is going to awaken the dead. The trumpet sounding now, you see, for the Buddhists, wake up! There is this moment, and this is eternity. Only you are stringing the moments together, and you are creating time out of eternity.

[18:48]

You're wondering, you're identifying yourself, in other words, with all the things that have happened to me, and you're worrying about all the things that will. But actually, you are never anywhere but now. This is a very interesting discipline that is given in all systems of yoga and Buddhist meditation. The student is told to live in the present completely, to never relax awareness of what you are doing now. Be here. So you would say, in the ordinary way, I have thoughts about tomorrow and yesterday and I'm distracted. My mind doesn't stay focused on the present. That's the way it seems, yes. So what you do instead is you try to focus your attention completely on the present. You find this a very difficult thing to do because you don't know when the present is.

[19:57]

In other words, you don't recognize that anything happens until it's already a memory. It has, as it were, to be in your consciousness long enough to make an impression. And you say, well, in looking at this table... I wish I could find something different from tables in the illustration, John. All lecturers are always talking about tables. In looking at this pipe, I don't know it's here... until somehow or other it has lingered. So I ask, am I actually knowing the present life, or is it always past? So as you continue to practise this exercise, you get the funny feeling that your memory of something past is also a present event. You see, you have the memory, it is here, And this begins to bug you, like it did St. Augustine. He couldn't understand memory. He got into a terrible tailspin about it.

[21:02]

Because, you see, the memory of the past is something always present. So you finally realize that the whole exercise you're undertaking was pointless, because there is nowhere else to be but the present. But that was the point of trying to make you do this thing, to get you to realize that there is no past, And there is no future. There is only now, and you can't get out of it. So relax. You're in eternity, in the moment. And it flows along, or flows, doesn't flow. You know this thing of Tennyson's poem, such a tide as moving seems to sleep, too full for sound or foam. The unmoved mover, the idea of somehow motion and stillness going together, activity and peace, the eye of the hurricane.

[22:12]

You see, everything is really like that. Well, now, All that I've said hitherto is introductory to going on for this seminar. to discuss the second great point of view that is involved in Mahayana Buddhism. The first, the madhyamika, the middle way, was, as I said, to destroy all your hang-ups, fixed opinions about the nature of life so that you don't use ideas, beliefs, religious prejudices, preferences, opinions. We don't use them to cling. It demolishes every idea of reality. that you could have. That's Madhyamaka. That's Nagarjuna. Now, a little later in time, there arose in India two other great Buddhist philosophers, respectively Asanga, A-S-A-N-G-A, and Vasubandhu, V-A-S-U-B-A-N-D-H-U.

[23:28]

There may have been two Vasubandhus. either father and son or teacher and student who took his teacher's name. And they lived in this vague dating that we have, it's impossible to pin it down, about 400 A.D. And they are responsible for what is called the Yogacara school. That's Yoga, Y-O-G-A-C-A-R-A. Yogacara, sometimes called also vijñaptimatra, which means the school of consciousness only. And it looks deceptively like what we call in Western philosophy subjective idealism, as taught, say, by Berkeley or Bradley.

[24:31]

That, in other words, the only reality is your mind, as this is propounded in Western philosophy. Everything that exists is in your mind. You know an external world only in your mind. You know the sense of space between yourself and something distant from you. That is a mental phenomenon. And so it could be argued that your mind alone exists and that all that you see is an imagination. The extreme way of posing this is the doctrine called solipsism, that there is only yourself and that everything else is your dream. There has never been any way of disproving this. except my idea, which I think almost disproves it, that I would like to be present at a conference of solipsists where they argue as to which one of them is the one that's really there.

[25:48]

So the point of view of, say, Berkeley or Bradley in the Western tradition of subjective idealism is not solipsistic. But it is that everybody has a certain independent existence, but as a mind. And that all particular minds are, as it were, minds in a supermind, which is the mind of God. Now, so the Western philosopher has therefore dealt with the problem. Does something exist when there's nobody around to look at it? By saying, there was a young man who said, God, I find it exceedingly odd that a tree as a tree simply ceases to be when there's no one around in the quad. Young man, your astonishment's odd.

[26:57]

I'm always around in the quad, so the tree as a tree never ceases to be since observed by your faithfully God. But this isn't the same point of view that we're going to deal with in Oriental philosophy, because we start from completely different assumptions as to the nature of mind and matter. And you see, if you don't get those straight, you confuse the Yogacara school with subjective idealism. Unfortunately, Professor Takakusu, in his book The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, uses Western school names. to classify the different types of Buddhist philosophy. He uses nihilism, subjective idealism, etc., etc., all down the line, but this is very confusing.

[28:05]

Because when you start with the basic idea of what is mind, you don't begin with the opposition that we begin with, which is mind-matter. You begin instead with the contrast mind and form. And form is furthermore broken down into name and form. It is called in Sanskrit nama-rupa. N-a-m-a, that is name, same word, rupa, r-u-p-a, name-form. And this stands in their system as distinct from the idea of matter meaning stuff in our common sense. So you see, we begin with this break that we have the notion that there is some kind of heavy, hard substance. And this substance is energized by spiritual forces.

[29:13]

which just as the potter turns clay into pots, the spiritual forces take hold of the unintelligent stuff of matter and weave it into all the various shakes of life. And so then when we die, here is a person, you see, who was going along, was talking, chatting, doing his business every day, and suddenly, zingo, his body lies there. Where is he? What's happened to him? Well, of course, the mind has left. and there dies only the stuff. So we've got this idea in our minds of the energy, which is something impalpable, something unstuffed, you see, animating or not animating, something that is heavy and hard and dusty. Now that great contrast which comes, of course, from the book of Genesis, from the idea that the Lord God formed the world out of some clay.

[30:20]

Adam was a clay figurine. This idea is not in the same way in Hindu thought. But something deceptively like it is in Hindu thought, which causes the confusion. For example, Shankara, who is the great interpreter of the Upanishads, in the tradition of interpretation which is called the Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual Vedanta, sometimes uses the symbol of gold and things made of gold, which sounds like the pots and the clay, but he uses it in another way than we do. Whereas we use the clay as the symbol for the stuff out of which things are made, and which is inferior because the shape, being spiritual, is more important than the stuff, he uses it in exactly the opposite way.

[31:27]

He says all beings are of the nature of the divine, just as many different objects can be made out of gold. It is all one gold, though the shape may change, and he describes, you see, the shape as ephemeral and impermanent, but it is the gold which is the thing that endures. You see that using the analogy, the metaphor, in an exactly opposite way from the way we use clay or staff and form in the West. So then, you don't have at the basis of the mind-only philosophy, a conception of mind which is the kind of impalpable spook presiding over the hard and heavy stuff. You have to begin somewhere else altogether, and this is the fascination of studying Oriental culture.

[32:36]

you have to readjust your own common sense to get at it. What on earth do these people mean? Especially when I don't really have any words in my own language into which I can translate their ideas. Now, fortunately, it isn't all that inaccessible. Because What we have here is not merely words. If that were all, we would be absolutely lost. But we have the techniques, the meditation disciplines, which you can use, and through using them, find out what it was that they meant, experimentally. So then, We start basically with the fundamental word that is used in Sanskrit for the activity of mind, and this is citta.

[33:45]

We romanize this as C-I-T-T-A. The root cit, C-I-T, is basic, to mind. Now, the Sanskrit language has many words for mind. We have this one word, mind, which sort of has to take care of everything. We've got intellect, we've got vision, consciousness, and so on, but they're all very vague in the way they're used. Sanskrit is quite precise, but chit is the basic term. Reality itself is called, in Vedanta philosophy, sat-cit-ananda. Sat means real. This word, the root, sa, in Sanskrit is

[35:03]

what is manifest and is really there. It comes from breathing out. You make the sound sa. And so it's really there. Chit is, it is conscious, has the quality of consciousness. Ananda means bliss. because reality, if not blissful, would not be. The game has to be worth the candle, or it would stop. If the fundamental impulse and energy of the universe were not blissful, the whole system would have ceased long ago. Even if it involves pain,

[36:05]

This pain is masochistic. That is to say, it is pain being enjoyed fundamentally as a pleasure, like you can have a grievance and make your whole life a cause around your grievance, like being a professionally rejected woman or a failure of some kind, and you can really build this up into a big thing, you see. And so, in this funny sort of rather trivial human way, you make an ecstasy out of suffering. And the idea here is that the universe is fundamentally, insofar as it involves suffering, making an ecstasy out of it. That is to say that every element of pain in the whole scheme of things is the necessary what will I call it, contrasting element that you need in order to bring out the fundamental exuberance and joy of being that you wouldn't know, in other words, that you were here unless something stopped you.

[37:22]

Now, Mind, in this philosophy, what is meant by chit, is practically exactly the same thing as we mean by existence. When we use the word being, and we, in order to, for example, when Dr. Johnson heard of Berkeley's philosophy that everything existed only in your mind, his response was to kick a stone. as if to demonstrate that's the real world. But it is exactly this sense of that is meant by chip. And that's why when a Zen master, you know, would be asked, what is the fundamental meaning of Buddhism? He answers, you know, this thing, this sense of impact of the, ooh,

[38:28]

That is what it is. In other words, mind in this philosophy is as concrete as you can imagine. And so it is called, and we will in a future seminar go into this from another point of view, the word vajra. which means diamond is used for it. Because the diamond is simultaneously the hardest thing there is and the most transparent. So there's a whole philosophy of Buddhism worked around the image of the diamond. So what you've got here, you see, is a conception of mind. which instead of being the impalpable ghostly thing that we have had, is the most intensely tough reality, the adamantine mind.

[39:36]

Bang, hard, you, pure, you see, this very strong sense of being. So the philosophy of it's all in your mind has to be hung on this, as distinct from being hung on something flimsy and impalpable. That was a lecture by the late Alan Watts, entitled Yoga Kara. If you'd like to get a catalog of...

[40:18]

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