to Japan twice—once in 1963 and again in 1965. It was on the second Japan tour that he recorded himself in a series of talks that have come to be known as the Japan Seminars. Today these sessions offer one of the most readily comprehensible introductions to Buddhism available in the English language. Watts presents the essential tenets of Buddhism in a concise form, rich with illustrative stories and infused with the spirit in which this great tradition has evolved. The current volume is composed of four sessions from the Japan Seminars—The Journey from India, The Middle Way, Religion of No-Religion, and Buddhism As Dialogue—and two sessions on Tibetan Buddhism recorded four years later in 1969 aboard his ferryboat in Sausalito, California—Wisdom of the Mountains and Transcending Duality. These selections provide an intimate overview of the development of Buddhist thought and offer an introduction to one of the world’s most fascinating ways of liberation.
—Mark Watts
August 1995
THE JOURNEY FROM INDIA
CHAPTER ONE
In order to introduce Buddhism, it is necessary to remember the whole background of the worldview of India and study Indian cosmology, just as you would have to study the Ptolemaic cosmology and worldview in order to understand Dante and much of medieval Christianity. The Hindu cosmology and view of the universe has come into Japanese life through Buddhism, but it antedates Buddhism. Buddhism simply adopted it as a matter of course, just as you would probably adopt the cosmology of modern astronomy if you invented a new religion today.
Human beings have had three great views of the world. One is the Western view of the world as a construct or artifact, by analogy with ceramics and carpentry. Then there is the Hindu view of the world as a drama, looked at as a play. Third is the organic Chinese view, looking on the world as an organism, a body. But the Hindu view sees it as a drama, or simply that there is what there is, and always was, and always will be, which is called the self; in Sanskrit, atman. Atman is also called brahman, from the root bri: to grow, to expand, to swell, related to our word breath. Brahman, the self in the Hindu worldview, plays hide-and-seek with itself forever and ever. How far out, how lost can you get? According to the Hindu idea, each one of us is the godhead, getting lost on purpose for the fun of it. And how terrible it gets at times! But won’t it be nice when we wake up? That’s the basic idea, and I’ve found that any child can understand it. It has great simplicity and elegance.
This cosmology or conception of the universe has many features, including the kalpas, or vast periods of time through which the universe passes. Another aspect is the six worlds, or paths of life. This idea of six worlds is very important in Buddhism, although it comes from Hinduism, and is represented in what is called the phava chakra. Phava means “becoming”; chakra means “wheel.” The wheel of becoming, or wheel of birth and death, has six divisions. The people on top are called devas. The people on the bottom are called naraka. Devas are angels, the people who are the supreme worldly successes. The naraka are tormented in hell and they are the supreme worldly failures. These are the poles: the happiest people and the saddest people. In between comes the world of the pretas, or hungry ghosts, next to the naraka in hell. The pretas are the frustrated spirits who have tiny mouths and enormous bellies—huge appetites but very limited means of satisfying them. Next up from the pretas are the human beings. They are supposed to hold a middle position in the six worlds. Then you go up from the human beings to the devas and then you start coming down again. The next world is called the asura, in which are the wrathful spirits, personifications of scorn and of all the anger and violence of nature. Next down are the animals, coming between the asura and the hells.
These needn’t be taken literally; they are different modalities of the human mind. We are in the naraka world when we are frustrated and in torment. When we are merely chronically frustrated we are in the preta world. When we are in a state of equanimity or even-mindedness, we are in the human world. When we are deliriously happy we are in the deva world. When we are furious we are in the asura world. And when we are dumb we are in the animal world. These are all modalities, and it is terribly important to understand that in Buddhism, the better you get, the more you go up to the deva world, the worse you get, the more you go down to the naraka world. Everything that goes up has to come down; you can’t improve yourself indefinitely. If you improve yourself beyond a certain limit you simply start to get worse, like when you make a knife too sharp and it begins to wear away. Buddhahood, liberation, or enlightenment is not on any place on the wheel, unless it might be the center. By ascending, by becoming better, you tie yourself to the wheel by golden chains. By retrogressing and becoming worse, you tie yourself to the wheel with iron chains. But the Buddha is the one who gets rid of the chains altogether.
This explains why Buddhism, unlike Judaism and Christianity, is not frantically concerned with being good; it is concerned with being wise. It is concerned with being compassionate, which is a little different from being good, with having tremendous sympathy and understanding and respect for all the ignorant people who don’t know that they’re it but who are playing the very far-out game of being “you and I.” This is why every Hindu greets his brother not by shaking hands but by putting his hands together and bowing. And this is basically why the Japanese bow to each other, and why the Buddhist rituals are full of the bowing gesture, because you are honoring the self playing the roles of all the people around you. All the more honor is due when the self has forgotten what it is doing and is therefore in a very far-out situation. That is the basic Hindu view of the world, and the cosmology that goes along with Buddhism.
According to taste, temperament, tradition, popular belief, and so on, there is this additional idea that when the lord, or self, pretends that it is each of us, it first of all pretends that it is an individual soul called the jivatman. The jivatman reincarnates through a whole series of bodies, life after life after life. According to what is called karma, literally meaning “doing” or “the law of doing,” acts occur in a series and are linked with each other in an unbreakable chain. Everybody’s karma is the life course that he will work out through perhaps innumerable lifetimes. I’m not going into that, because a lot of Buddhists do not believe it.
For example, Zen people are quite divided on this, and say they don’t believe literally in reincarnation—that after your funeral you suddenly become somebody different, living somewhere else. They say reincarnation means that if you, sitting here now, are really convinced that you are the same person who walked in the door half an hour ago, you are being reincarnated. If you are liberated, you will understand that you are not. The past does not exist; the future does not exist. There is only the present. That is the only real you that there is. Zen master Dogen put it this way, “Spring does not become summer. First there is spring and then there is summer. Each season stays in its own place.” In the same way, the you of yesterday does not become the you of today. T. S. Eliot has the same idea in his poem Four Quartets, where he says that when you settle down in the train to read your newspaper, you are not the same person who, a little while before, left the platform. If you think you are, you are linking up your moments in a chain. This is what binds you to the wheel of birth and death, unlike when you know that every moment where you are is the only moment. So a Zen master will say to somebody, “Get up and walk across the room.” And when they come back he asks, “Where are your footprints?” They’ve gone.
Where are you? Who are you? When we are asked who we are, we usually give a kind of recitation of a history. “I’m So-and-so. I was given this name by my parents. I’ve been to such-and-such a college. I’ve done these things in my profession.” And we produce a little biography. The Buddhist says, “Forget it; that’s not you. That is some story that’s all past. I want to see the real you, the you you are now.” Nobody knows who that is, because we do not know ourselves except through listening to our echoes and consulting our memories. But then the real you leads us back to this question, Who is the real you? We shall see how they play with this in Zen koans to get you to come out of your shell and find out who you really are.
In India this worldview is tied up with a whole culture involving every circumstance of everyday life, but Hinduism is not a religion in the same sense that Episcopalianism or even Roman Catholicism are.