"philosophies of asia - alan watts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Alan)

The great master of this technique was a Buddhist scholar who lived about 200 A.D. called Nagarjuna. He invented a whole dialectic, and he created madhyamaka, where the leader of the students would simply destroy all their ideas, absolutely abolish their philosophical notions, and they'd get the heebie-jeebies. He didn't have the heebie-jeebies. He seemed perfectly relaxed in not having any particular point of view. They said, "Teacher, how can you stand it? We have to have something to hang on to." "Who does? Who are you?" And eventually you discover, of course, that it is not necessary to hang on to or rely on anything. There is nothing to rely on, because you're it. It is like asking the question, "Where is the universe?" By that I mean the whole universe-whereabouts is it in space? Everything in it is falling around everything else, but there's no concrete floor underneath for the thing to crash on. You can think of infinite space if you like-you don't have to think of curved space, the space that goes out and out and out forever and ever and has no end: What is that? Of course, it is you. What else could it be? The universe is delightfully arranged so that as it looks at itself, in order not to be one-sided and prejudiced, it looks at itself from an uncountable number of points of view. We thus avoid solipsism, as if I were to have the notion that it is only me that is really here, and you are all in my dream. Of course, that point of view cannot really be disputed except by imagining a conference of solipsists arguing as to which one of them was the one that was really there.
Now, if you understand what I am saying by using your intelligence, and then take the next step and say, "I understood it now, but I didn't feet it," then next I raise the question, "Why do you want to feel it?" You say, "I want something more," but that is again spiritual greed, and you can only say that because you didn't understand it. There is nothing to pursue, because you are it. You always were it, and to put it in Christian terms or Jewish terms, if you don't know that you are God from the beginning, what happens is that you try to become God by force. Therefore you become violent and obstreperous and this, that, and the other. All our violence, all our competitiveness, all our terrific anxiety to survive is because we didn't know from the beginning that we were it.
Well, then you would say, "If only we did know from the beginning," as in fact you did when you were a baby. But then everybody says, "Well, nothing will ever happen." But it did happen, didn't it? And some of it is pretty messy. Some people say, "Well, take the Hindus.
It is basic to Hindu religion that we are all God in disguise, and that the world is an illusion." All that is a sort of half-truth, but if that is the case-if really awakened Hindus by the knowledge of their union with the godhead would simply become inert, why then Hindu music, the most incredibly complex, marvelous technique? When they sit and play, they laugh at each other. They are enjoying themselves enormously with very complicated musical games. But when you go to the symphony everybody is dressed in evening dress and with the most serious expressions. When the orchestra gets up, the audience sits down, and it is like a kind of church. There is none of that terrific zest, where the drummer, the tabla player, laughs at the sarod player as they compete with each other in all kinds of marvelous improvisations. So, if you do find out, by any chance, who you really are, instead of becoming merely lazy, you start laughing. And laughing leads to dancing, and dancing needs music, and we can play with each other for a change.

INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM

CHAPTER SIX

The idea of a yana, or vehicle, comes from the basic notion or image of Buddhism as a raft for crossing a river. This shore is ordinary everyday consciousness such as we have, mainly the consciousness of being an ego or a sensitive mind locked up inside a mortal body-the consciousness of being you in particular and nobody else. The other shore is release, or nirvana, a word that means literally "blow out," as one says, whew, in heaving a sigh of relief. Nirvana is never, never to be interpreted as a state of extinction or a kind of consciousness in which you are absorbed into an infinitely formless, luminous ocean that could best be described as purple Jell-O, but kind of spiritual. Horrors! It is not meant to be that at all. Nirvana has many senses, but the primary meaning of it is that it is this everyday life, just as we have it now, but seen and felt in a completely different way. Buddhism is called in general a dharma, and this word is often mistranslated as "the law." It is better translated as "the doctrine," and still better translated as "the method." The dharma was formulated originally by the Buddha, who was the son of a north Indian raja living very close to Nepal who was thriving shortly after 600 B.C. The word buddha is a title. The proper name of this individual was Gautama Siddhartha, and the word buddha means "the awakened one," from the Sanskrit root buddh, which means "to wake" or "to know." So, we could say buddha means "the man who woke up." The Buddha was a very skillful psychologist, and he is in a way the first psychotherapist in history, a man of tremendous understanding of the wiles and the deviousness of the human mind.
Buddhism is made to be easily understood. Everything is numbered so that you can remember it, and the bases of Buddhism are what are called the four noble truths. The first one is the truth about suffering, the second is the truth about the cause of suffering, the third is the truth about the ceasing of suffering, and the fourth is the truth about the way to the ceasing of suffering. So let's go back to the beginning-suffering. The Sanskrit word is duhkha. It means suffering in the widest possible sense, but "chronic suffering" or "chronic frustration" is probably as good a translation as any. Buddhism says the life of mankind and of animalsindeed also of angels, if you believe in angels-is characterized by chronic frustration. And so, that constitutes a problem. If any one of you says, "I have a problem"well, I don't suppose you would be here if you didn't in some way have a problem-that is duhkha. Now, the next thing is the cause of it. The cause of it is called trishna. Trishna is a Sanskrit word that is the root of our word thirst, but means more exactly "craving," "clutching," or "desiring." Because of craving or clutching we create suffering, but in turn, this second truth is that behind trishna there lies another thing called ignorance-avidya, or "nonvisioned." Vid in Sanskrit is the root of the Latin videre and of our vision. And a in front of the word means "non." So, avidya is not-seeing, ignorance, or better, ignorance, because our mind as it functions consciously is a method of attending to different and particular areas of experience, one after another, one at a time.
When you focus your consciousness on a particular area, you ignore everything else. That is why to know is at the same time to ignore, and because of that, there arises trishna, or craving. Why? Because if you ignore what you really know, you come to imagine that you are separate from the rest of the universe, and that you are alone, and therefore you begin to crave or to thirst. You develop an anxiety to survive, because you think if you are separate, if you are not the whole works, you're going to die. Actually, you're not going to die at all. You are simply going to stop doing one thing and start doing something else.
When you die in the ordinary way, you just stop doing this thing, in this case called Alan Watts, but you do something else later. And there is nothing to worry about at all. Only when you are entirely locked up in the illusion that you are only this do you begin to be frightened and anxious, and that creates thirst. So, if you can get rid of ignorance (ignorance) and widen your mind out so as to see the other side of the picture, then you can stop craving. That does not mean to say you won't enjoy your dinner anymore, and that it won't be nice to make love, or anything like that. It doesn't mean that at all. It means that enjoying your dinner and making love, and generally enjoying the senses and all of experience, only become an obstacle to you if you cling to them 'tn order to save yourself. However, if you do not need to save yourself, you can enjoy life just as much as ever: you don't have to be a puritan.
So, then, that is the state of letting go, instead of clinging to everything. Supposing you are in business and you have to make money to keep a family supported-that is the thing to do, but don't let it get you down. Do it, in what the Hindus call nishkama karma. Nishkama means "passionless" and karma means "activity." That means doing all the things that one would do in life, one's business, one's occupation, but doing it without taking it seriously. Do it as a game, and then everybody who depends on you will like it much better. If you take it seriously, they will be feeling guilty, because they will say, "Oh dear, Papa absolutely knocks himself out to work for us," and they become miserable. They go on, and they live their lives out of a sense of duty, which is a dreadful thing to do. So, that is nirvana, to live in a let-go way.
The fourth noble truth describes the way or the method of realizing nirvana, called the noble eightfold path. The eightfold path is a series of eight human activities, such as understanding or view, effort, vocation or occupation, speaking, conduct, and so forth, and they are all prefaced by the Sanskrit word samyak, which is very difficult to translate. Most people translate it as "right" in the sense of correct, but this is an incomplete translation. The root sam in Sanskrit is the same as our word sum through the Latin summa. The sum of things means completion, but it also conveys the sense of balanced or "middle-wayed." Buddhism is called the Middle Way, and we'll find out a great deal about that later.
Every Buddhist who belongs to the Theravada for Hinayana] school in the south expresses the fact that he is a Buddhist by reciting a certain formula called tisarana and pancha-sila. I am talking Pali now, not Sanskrit. Tisarana means the three refuges, and pancha-sila means "the five precepts."

Buddharn saddanam gacchame
Dbarmam saddanam gacchame
Sangam saddanam gacchame

That means "I take refuge in Buddha; I take refuge in the method, the dharma; I take refuge in the sangha" (which means the fraternity of the followers of Buddha). He then goes on to take the five precepts: "I promise to abstain from taking life," "I promise to abstain from taking what is not given," "I promise to abstain from exploiting my passions," "I promise to abstain from false speech," and "I promise to abstain from getting intoxicated" by a list of various boozes.
Now, every Buddhist in the Southern school says, "Mahayanists have a different formula." This is the method, and the method, the dharma, is therefore a moral law, but it isn't just like the Ten Commandments-it is quite different. You do not take the five precepts in obedience to a royal edict. You take them upon yourself, and there is a very special reason for doing so. How can you fulfill the precept not to take life? Every day you eat. Even if you're a vegetarian, you must take life. This is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of Buddhism. Buddhism is a method-it is not a doctrine. Buddhism is a dialogue, and what it states at the beginning is not necessarily what it would state at the end. The method of Buddhism is, first of all, a relationship between a teacher and a student. The student creates the teacher by raising a problem and going to someone about it.
Now, if he chooses wisely, he will find out if there is a buddha around to use as the teacher, and then he says to the buddha, "My problem is that I suffer, and I want to escape from suffering." So, the buddha replies, "Suffering is caused by desire, by trishna, by craving. If you can stop desiring then you will solve your problem. Go away and try to stop desiring." He then gives him some methods of how to practice meditation and to make his mind calm in order to see if he can stop desiring. The student goes away and practices this. Then he comes back to the teacher and says, "But I can't stop desiring not to desire. What am I to do about that?" So the teacher says, "Try, then, to stop desiring not to desire."
Now, you can see where this is going to end up. He might put it in this way: "All right, if you can't completely stop desiring, do a middle way. That is to say, stop desiring as much as you can stop desiring, and don't desire to stop any more desire than you can stop." Do you see where that's going to go? He keeps coming back because what the teacher has done in saying "Stop desiring" is he has given his student what in Zen Buddhism is called a koan. This is a Japanese word that means "a meditation problem," or more strictly, the same thing that case means in law, because koans are usually based on anecdotes and incidents of the old masters- cases and precedents. But the function of a koan is a challenge for meditation. Who is it that desires not to desire? Who is it that wants to escape from suffering?
Here we get into a methodological difference between Hinduism and Buddhism on the question of "Who are you?" The Hindu says, "Your self is called the atman, the self. Now, strive to know the self. Realize I am not my body, because I can be aware of my body. I am not my thoughts, because I can be aware of my thoughts. I am not my feelings for the same reason. I am not my mind, because I can be aware of it. Therefore, I really am other than and above, transcending all these finite aspects of me."
Now, the Buddhist has a critique of that. He says, "Why do you try to escape from yourself as a body?" The reason is your body falls apart and you want to escape from it. "Why do you want to disidentify yourself from your emotions?" The reason is that your emotions are uncomfortable and you want to escape from them. You don't want to have to be afraid. You don't want to have to be in grief or anger, and even love is too muchit involves you in suffering, because if you love someone you are a hostage to fortune. So, the Buddha says the reason why you believe you are the atman, the eternal self, which in turn is the brahman, the self of the whole universe, is that you don't want to lose your damn ego. If you can fix your ego and put it in the safe-deposit box of the Lord, you think you've still got yourself, but you haven't really let go. So, the Buddha said there isn't any atman: he taught the doctrine of anatman, or nonself. Your ego is unreal, and as a matter of fact, there is nothing you can cling to-no refuge, really. just let go. There is no salvation, no safety, nothing anywhere, and you see how clever that was. What he was really saying is that any atman you could cling to or think about or believe in wouldn't be the real one.
This is the accurate sense of the original documents of the Buddha's teaching. If you carefully go through it, that is what he is saying. He is not saying that there isn't the atman or the brahman, he's saying anyone you could conceive wouldn't be it. Anyone you believed in would be the wrong one, because believing is still clinging. There is no salvation through believing, there is only salvation through knowledge, and even then the highest knowledge is nonknowledge.
Here he agrees with the Hindus, who say in the Kena Upanishad, "If you think that you know Brahman, you do not know him. But if you know that you do not know the Brahman, you truly know." Why? It is very simple. If you really are it, you don't need to believe in it, and you don't need to know it, just as your eyes don't need to look at themselves. That is the difference of method in Buddhism. Now, understand "method" here. The method is a dialogue, and the so-called teachings of Buddhism are the first opening gambits in the dialogue. When they say you cannot understand Buddhism out of books, the reason is that the books only give you the opening gambits. Then, having read the book, you have to go on with the method. Now, you can go on with the method without a formal teacher. That is to say, you can conduct the dialogue with yourself or with life. You have to explore and experiment on such things as "Could one possibly not desire?" "Could one possibly concentrate the mind perfectly?" "Could one possibly do this, that, and the other?" And you have to work with it so that you understand the later things that come after trying these experiments. These later things are the heart of Buddhism.
So then, shortly after the Buddha's time, the practice of Buddhism continued as a tremendous ongoing dialogue among the various followers, and eventually they established great universities, such as there was at Nalanda in northern India. A discourse was going on there, and if you looked at it superficially, you might think it was nothing but an extremely intellectual bull session where philosophers were outwitting each other. Actually, the process that was going on was this: the teacher or guru in every case was examining students as to their beliefs and theories and was destroying their beliefs by showing that any belief that you would propose, any idea about yourself or about the universe that you want to cling to and make something of-use for a crutch, a prop, or a security-could be demolished by the teacher. This is how the dialogue works, until you are left without a thing to hang on to. Any religion you might propose, even atheism, would be torn up. They would destroy agnosticism and any kind of belief. They were experts in demolition, so they finally got you to the point where you had nothing left to hang on to. Well, at that point you are free, because you're it. Once you are hanging on to things, you put "it" somewhere else, something "I" can grab. Even when you think, as an idea, "Then I'm it," you are still hanging on to that, and so they are going to knock that one down.
So, when you are left without anything at all, you've seen the point. That's the method of the dialogue, essentially. That is the dharma, and all Buddhists make jokes about this. Buddha says in The Diamond Sutra, "When I attained complete, perfect, unsurpassed awakening, I didn't attain anything." Because to use a metaphor that is used in the scriptures, it's like using an empty fist to deceive a child. You say to a child, "What have I got here?" The child gets interested immediately and wants to find out, and you hide it. The child climbs all over you and can't get at your fist. Finally, you do let him get it, and there's nothing in it. Now, that is the method again. "Teacher, you have the great secret, and I know you have it. There must be such a secret somewhere somebody knows." And that secret is, "How do I get one up on the universe?" I don't know that I'm it, so I'm trying to conquer it. So the teacher says, "Keep trying,' and he gets you going and going and going and goin@which shows you that in the end there is nothing to get, there never was any need to get anything and never was any need to realize anything, because you're it. And the fact that you think you're not is part of the game. So don't worry.
Many of the problems that are now being discussed by modern logicians are, unbeknownst to them, already in the ancient Indian books: problems of semantics, of meaning, and of the nature of time and memory. All these were discussed with very, very meticulous scholarly sophistication, so it is my opinion that this was a very fertile period of human history, and that the philosophy in which it eventually emerged-the philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism-is as yet the most mature and really intelligent theory of human life and of the cosmos that man has ever devised. It is characteristic of this point of view that it adheres to the Middle Way, but the Middle Way does not mean moderation. It means the bringing together of opposites, of what we might call in our world spirit and matter, mind and body, mysticism and sensuality, unity and multiplicity, conformity and individualism. All these things are marvelously wedded together in the world view of Mahayana.
Fundamental to Mahayana Buddhism is the idea of what is called the bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is a person who has as his essence (sattva), bodhi (awakening). It is usually used to mean a potential buddha, someone who is, as it were, just about to become a buddha. That was the original sense, and part of the Pali canon is a book called the Jatakamala, the tales of the Buddha's previous lives-how he behaved when he was an animal and as a man long before he became Buddha. In all these stories, he is represented as sacrificing himself for the
benefit of other beings, but since he had not yet become a fully fledged buddha, he is called in these stories a bodhisattva. That really means "a potential buddha," but the point is that as a potential buddha, as a bodhisattva, he is always involved in situations where he is feeding himself to the hungry tigers and so on.
Now, in the course of time, the term bodhisattva underwent a transformation. A bodhisattva matures and becomes a buddha, and what does that mean popularly? It means that whoever is fully awakened to the way things are is delivered from any necessity to be involved in the world anymore. In other words, you can go on to a transcendent level of being where time is abolished, where all times are now, where there are no problems, where there is perpetual eternal peace-nirvana in the sense of the word parinirvana, meaning beyond nirvana, super nirvana. So, if you are fed up with this thing and you don't want to play the game of hide-and-seek anymore, you can go into the parinirvana state and be in total serenity.
However, and again I am talking in the language of popular Buddhism, a person who stands on the threshold of that peace can turn back and say, "I won't be a buddha, I'll be a bodhisattva. I won't make the final attainment, because I would like to go back into the world of manifestation (called samsara) and work for their liberation." So, then, when a Mahayana Buddhist does his formula for puia, he says, "Sentient beings are numberless, I take a vow to save them. Deluding passions are inexhaustible, I take a vow to destroy them. The gates of the method, the dharma, are manifold, I take a vow to enter them. The Buddha way is supreme, I take a vow to complete it." Of course all this is impossible. Numberless sentient beings, because they are numberless, can never be delivered. Deluding passions which are inexhaustible can never be eradicated. So, this then is their formula.
The bodhisattva who returns into the world and becomes involved again is in fact regarded as a superior kind of being to the one who gets out of it. The person who gets out of the rat race and enters into eternal peace is called pratyeka-buddba, which means "private buddha," a buddha who does not teach or help others, and in Mahayana Buddhism that is almost a term of abuse. Pratyeka-buddha is a class with unbelievers, heretics' infidels, and fools, but the great thing is the bodhisattva.
All beings are thought of in popular Buddhism as constantly reincarnating again and again into the round of existence, helplessly, because they still desire. They are, therefore, drawn back into the cycle. The bodhisattva goes back into the cycle with his eyes wide open, voluntarily, and allows himself to be sucked in. This Is normally interpreted as an act of supreme compassion, and bodhisattvas can assume any guise. They can get furiously angry if necessary in order to discourage evil beings, and could even assume the role of a prostitute and live that way so as to deliver beings at that level of life. They could become an animal, an insect, a maggot, or anything else, and all deliberately and in full consciousness to carry on the work of the deliverance of all beings. Now, that is the way the popular mind understands it.
Therefore, the bodhisattvas are all revered, respected, worshiped, and looked upon as we look upon God in the West-as saviors, as the Christian looks upon Jesus. Underneath this myth there is a profound philosophical idea going back to the Hindu philosophy of advaita and non-duality-namely, that the apparent dualism of "I" and "thou," of the knower and the known, the subject and the object, is unreal. So, also, the apparent duality between maya, the world illusion, and reality is unreal. The apparent duality or difference between the enlightened and the ignorant person is unreal. So, the apparent duality of bondage and deliverance, or liberation, is unreal. The perfectly wise man is the one who realizes vividly that the ideal place is the place where you are. This is an impossible thing to put in words. The nearest I could get to it would be to say that if you could see this moment that you need nothing beyond this momentnow, sitting here, irrespective of anything I might be saying to you, of any ideas you might have rattling around in your brains-here and now is the absolute "whicb in which there is no whicher." Only, we prevent ourselves from seeing this because we are always saying, "Well, there ought to be something more. Aren't I missing something somehow?" But nobody sees it.
Now then, the most far-out form of Mahayana Buddhism is called the Pure Land school, jodo-shin-sbu. jodo means "pure land" and sbin-shu means "true sect." This is based on the idea that there was in immeasurably past ages a great bodhisattva called Amitabha, and he made a vow that he would never become a buddha unless any being who repeated his name would automatically at death be born into the Pure Land over which he presides-that is, a kind of paradise. He did become a buddha, and so the vow works. All you have to do is repeat the name of Amitabha, and this will assure that without any further effort on your part you will be reborn into his western paradise when you die, and in that paradise, becoming a buddha is a cinch. There are no problems there. The western paradise is a level of consciousness, but it is represented in fact as a glorious place. You can see the pictures of it in Koya-san, wonderful pictures where the Buddha Amitabha is actually a Persian figure related to Ahura Mazda, which means "boundless light." The Daibutsu of Kamakura, that enormous bronze buddha in the open air, is Amitabba.
So, there he sits surrounded with his court, and this court is full of upasaras, beautiful girls playing lutes. And as you were born into the paradise, what happens when you die is you discover yourself inside a lotus, and the lotus goes pop, and there you find yourself sitting, coming out of the water, and here on the clouds in front of you are the upasaras sitting, strumming their lutes, with the most sensuous, beautiful faces.
Now, to get this, all you have to do is say the name of Amitabha. The formula is Namu Amida butsu, and you can say this very fast, "Namu Amida butsu, Namu Amida butsu, Numanda, Numanda, Numanda." When said many, many times, you are quite sure it is going to happen.
Actually, you only have to say it once, and you mustn't make any effort to gain this reward, because that would be spiritual pride. Your karma, your bad deeds, your awful past, is so bad that anything good you try to do is done with a selfish motive, and therefore doesn't effect your deliverance. Therefore, the only way to get deliverance is to put faith in the power of this Amitabha Buddha and to accept it as a free gift, and to take it by doing the most absurd things-by saying "Namu Amida butsu." Don't even worry whether you have to have faith in this, because trying to have faith is also spiritual pride. It doesn't matter whether you have faith or whether you don't, the thing works anyway, so just say "Namu Amida butsu." Now, that is the most popular form of Buddhism in Asia.
The two most vast temples in Kyoto, the initiant Higashi Honganii temples, represent this sect, and everybody loves Amitabha. Amida, as they call him in Japan-boundless light, infinite Buddha of Compassion, is sitting there with this angelic expression on his face: "It's all right, boys, just say my name, it's all you have to do." So when we add together prayer wheels, Namu Amida butsu (the Japanese call it Nembutsu) as the means of remembering Buddha, and all these things where you just have to say an abbreviated prayer and the work is done for you, wouldn't we Westerners, especially if we are Protestants, say, "Oh, what a scoundrelly thing that is, what an awful degradation of religion, what an avoidance of the moral challenge and the effort and everything that is required. Is this what the bodhisattva doctrine of infinite compassion deteriorates into?"
Now, there is a profound aspect to all that. just as there is desperation and despair, nirvana desperation and despair of the horrors, so there are two ways of looking at this "nothing to do, no effort to make" idea, depending completely on the savior. For, who is Amitabha? Popularly, Amitabha is somebody else. He is some great compassionate being who looks after you. Esoterically, Amitabha is your own nature; Amitabha is your real self, the inmost boundless light that is the root and ground of your own consciousness. You don't need to do anything to be that. You are that, and saying Nembutsu is simply a symbolical way of pointing out that you don't have to become this, because you are it.
And Nembutsu, therefore, in its deeper side builds up a special kind of sage, which they called myoko-nin. Myoko-nin in Japanese means "a marvelous fine man," but the myoko-nin is a special type of personality who corresponds in the West to the holy fool in Russian spirituality, or to something like the Franciscan in Catholic spirituality.
I will tell you some myoko-nin stories because that is the best way to indicate their character. One day a myoko-nin was traveling and he stopped in a Buddhist temple overnight. He went up to the sanctuary where they have big cushions for the priests to sit on, and he arranged the cushions in a pile on the floor and went to sleep on them. In the morning the priest came in and saw the tramp sleeping and said, "What are you doing here desecrating the sanctuary by sleeping on the cushions and so on, right in front of the altar?" And the myoko-nin looked at him in astonishment and said, "Why, you must be a stranger here, you can't belong to the family."
In Japanese when you want to say that a thing is just the way it is, you call it sonomama. There is a haiku poem that says, "Weeds in the rice field, cut them down, sonomama, fertilizer." Cut the weeds, leave them exactly where they are, and they become fertilizer, or sonomama. And sonomama means "reality," "just the way it is," "just like that." Now, there is a parallel expression, konomama. Konomama means "I, just as I am." just little me, like that, with no frills, no pretense, except that I naturally have some pretense. That is part of konomama. The myoko-nin is the man who realizes that "I, konomama-just as I am-am Buddha, delivered by Amitabha because Amitabha is my real nature." If you really know that, that makes you a myoko-nin, but be aware of the fact that you could entirely miss the point and become a monkey instead by saying, "I'm all right just as I am, and therefore I'm going to rub it in-I'm going to be going around parading my unregenerate nature, because this is Buddha, too." The fellow who does that doesn't really know that it's okay. He's doing too much, and he is coming on too strong. The other people, who are always beating themselves, are making the opposite error. The Middle Way, right down the center, is where you don't have to do a thing to justify yourself, and you don't have to justify not justifying yourself. So, there is something quite fascinating and tricky in this doctrine of the great bodhisattva Amitabha, who saves you just as you are, who delivers you from bondage just as you are. You only have to say "Namu Amida butsu."
It is fascinating, but that is the principle of Mahayana, and your acceptance of yourself as you are is the same thing as coming to live now, as you are. Now is as you are, in the moment, but you can't come to now, and you can't accept yourself on purpose, because the moment you do that you're doing something unnecessary. You are doing a little bit more. That is what they call in Zen putting legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch. You've overdone it. How can you neither do something about it nor do nothing about it as if that was something you had to do? This is the same problem as originally posed in Buddhism: How do you cease from desiring? When I try to cease from desiring, I am desiring not to desire. Do you see this? All of this is what is called upaya, or skillful device, to slow you down so that you can really be here. By seeing that there is nowhere else you can be, you don't have to come to now. Where else can you be? It isn't a task or a contest-what the Greeks called agone. There is nowhere else to be, so they say, "Nirvana is no other than samsara." This shore is really the same as the other shore. As the Lankavatarasutra says, "If you look to try to get nirvana in order to escape suffering and being reborn, that's not nirvana at all."