In Enlightenment as Experience and as Non-Experience, Sangharakshita exposes a modern disease of frustrated craving for experience. He suggests that spiritual life is better seen in more concrete ways; as growth, work, and duty.
Talk given in 1975.
Free Buddhist Audio
Enlightenment as Experience and as Non-Experience
This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. Mr. Humphreys and friends, practically speaking, and we may say that Buddhism is nothing if not practical. Practically speaking, Buddhism, as we call it in the West or the Dharma, as we should perhaps more correctly call it, consists principally, one might even say essentially, of true things. It consists in the first place of a path, a way, and in the second place it consists of a goal, if you like, an objective, and the path has been, can be, variously described. According to context, it is spoken of as the noble or the holy eightfold path. The path not of eight stages is sometimes the word is translated, but rather of eight members, eight factors. It's spoken also of as the path of the six, sometimes the ten, paramitas, the perfections, the transcendences, or even transcendental virtues. And again, that path, that way, is spoken of, perhaps even more frequently, as the middle way, the middle path between and above extremes. These are just some of the ways in which we speak about that path. And then the goal, the goal is what we can only describe in tentative words of human speech, as Buddhahood, supreme, perfect enlightenment. And enlightenment itself can be thought of, can be envisaged in various ways, in all sorts of ways, as supreme wisdom, as absolute connosis, insight into things as they really are, also as compassion, infinite compassion, the planetude of compassion, compassion which pours out in all directions simultaneously onto all sentient beings. It can be spoken of, it can be thought of also in terms of infinite, spiritual, even transcendental energy, radiating irresistibly in all directions. And also it can be spoken of, thought of, in terms of an utter, a complete purity, not just as we understand purity, not just as purity in respect of evil, but even purity in respect of good. So in these ways and in so many other ways too, can enlightenment be thought of, can be spoken of. And we can think of it, we can speak of it also as an experience. We can speak of it, think of it as the experience even, the culminating experience, the greatest of all experiences, if you like, as the experience to end all experiences. And it's with this that we're concerned tonight with enlightenment as experience and also as non-experience, which perhaps you might be thinking, is something rather more mysterious, rather more recognized, even, and this is of course the sort of word that people love and the sort of thing that they expect, something esoteric. So what we're going to do in the course of the following hour, and of course I mustn't forget our Chairman's well-known love of punctuality, not only in beginning meetings, but also in concluding them, what we're going to consider in the course of the ensuing hour is just some of the implications of thinking, of enlightenment in this way, thinking of it in terms of experience. So first, what do we mean by experience? After all we use the term often enough, but what do we mean by experience? Usually experience is distinguished from thought, that it would say distinguished from abstract thought, from conceptual thought, even though of course in a sense thought itself is an experience. Now if we want to speak just very generally, basically, with regard to what experience is, we may say that experience is principally, is, outstandingly, a matter of perception and feeling, experience means the actual living through an event. Not just looking at it, not just contemplating it, not just thinking about it, but actually living through that event, experiencing it as we say. This also means, also suggests, real life is contrasted with the ideal or the imaginary life or existence. So enlightenment as experience means, therefore, enlightenment as something which we actually perceive, which we actually feel, felt in the nerves and felt along the heart, felt in the blood, felt in the bones, not just something abstractly thought about or speculated about, imagined or fantasized about, and something that we live through. Enlightenment as experience is something that we live through, but when of course we experience enlightenment, we live through enlightenment in a rather different way from the way in which we live through any other experience. In the case of other experiences, we, as it were, come out at the other end intact or modified to some extent. But in the case of the experience of enlightenment, we do not come out at the other end. There is no end, maybe there's an end of us, but that is another matter. We do not come out at the other end. So that we may say, enlightenment is something which is, as it were, a continuing part of our life after we've experienced it, or rather our life becomes a continuing part of enlightenment itself. But how did we come to think of enlightenment in this way? How did we come to think of enlightenment in terms of experience? We mustn't think that this is the natural, the inevitable, the only way of thinking about things, thinking about enlightenment, thinking in terms of experience. This is, if you look at it, a rather odd way of thinking. We might have become used to it, but that simply means that we've become used to it. There are alternatives. So how did we come to think of enlightenment in this way? How did we come to make the statement that enlightenment is an experience? And probably that is a statement with which no one would wish to disagree, not without being rather pedantic, perhaps. So this way of speaking, that is to say, of enlightenment as experience, is not an Indian way, not an Indian Buddhist way, to speak of enlightenment as an experience. In the Pali scriptures, that is to say, in the ancient scriptures of the Theravada school, some portions of which come very close to the Buddha's original teaching. In the Pali scriptures, there's no reference to enlightenment as experience, but something perhaps to ponder upon. They get along in the Pali scriptures without the need of speaking of enlightenment in terms of experience. The very early Buddhists, as far as we know, didn't think of enlightenment imprecisely those terms. Perhaps experience was implied, but it was never stated in so many words, in that sort of word, or in an equivalent word, enlightenment as experience. That was not their mode of thought. If we come on to say the Langkavatarasutra, which, as everybody knows, I'm sure is one of the greatest of the Mahayana sutras, if we come on to the Langkavatarasutra, we find that the Langkavatarasutra speaks of something that it calls gati-go-chara. I'm not going to try to explain what gati-go-chara really means. This will take me much too far afield. But Suzuki does translate it as experience, which is very approximate indeed. I don't think that would get passed to a really strict scholar, not as an exact translation. Gati-go-chara, in the sense of, as it were, the experience inverted commas of Adiaknana, that is to say, noble wisdom. And the Langkavataras also speaks of Pratyatma-go-chara, which Suzuki translates as inner realization. Again, a bit like, you could say, experience, but not very exactly so by any means. So even if we do accept that the Langkavatarasutra does, in a way, speak of enlightenment in terms of experience, is in a rather distant and almost equivocal sort of way, you could translate alternatively. And in any case, the Langkavataras is quite a late sutra, in its present form, it could not have been compiled more than, or less than probably, seven to eight hundred years after the time of Shakya Muni, the Buddha. And we could even say perhaps that the Langkavataras, it's teaching, it's approach, it's stress on what we now call experience, or on something corresponding to what we now call experience does reflect developments taking place in India, analogous to certain developments taking place in the West very, very much later. In Parlian Sanskrit, we can say it's as difficult to speak of enlightenment as experience in our sense as to say that all life is one. To say that all life is one may be a justifiable interpretation or reinterpretation of Buddhist teaching, but you can't put it back into either Parlian Sanskrit. It represents a quite different mode of expression, a mode of expression which is a product of a modern, western way of thinking. If we want to translate back into Parlian Sanskrit, enlightenment is an experience, or all life is one, we can't do it, because we become involved, not in translation, but in reinterpretation, rethinking, if you like even, re-experiencing, making a new, which is of course one of the things that you mustn't do according to some schools of Buddhism in the East. Naavakata, as they call it, making new is equivalent to heresy, but anyway, we won't see anything more about that at the moment. So we may say that this particular kind of expression, speaking of enlightenment as experience is the product even of our own particular mode of experiencing, I mean to use the word which is itself under discussion, it's part of the way in which we've come to regard religion generally. We can even say it's part of the way in which we've come to regard life itself, thinking of it, speaking of it in terms of experience, even stressing experience. Now how is this? I've no time for a detailed exposition. There must just be a few general points made, a few scattered hints and no more. So let's take quite a broad view. Let's have quite a broad sweep of history in the Western Europe, and having that broad view that broad sweep we can say, that up to the time of the Reformation, religion in Christian Europe was a very, very much richer and more complex thing than it is today. Then up to that time in the West, I'm thinking of course mainly of the Christian religion which superseded earlier faiths. Religion consisted of quite a number of different elements, quite a number of different aspects. For instance there was doctrine, theology, scholastic philosophy, there was ethics, there was a ridicule, sacrament, literally. There were great festivals, celebrations, pageantries, there were social institutions, folk customs, law, canon law for instance, myth, legend, mysticism, asceticism, even just marvel and miracle, all these things, making up religion, going to make up religion up to the time of the Reformation. We could even include such things as painting, sculpture, architecture, music, all these were as they were incorporated and integrated into religion, into the dominant religious values so that you had indeed a many splendid thing, something very rich, something very complex, something very inspiring. But that great synthesis did break down. With the Reformation, came a change, they gained no time to go into details and especially a change, came about in the Protestant or what afterwards became the Protestant parts of Europe. Doctrine became much more rigid. In fact there wasn't any one Christian doctrine anymore, there were a number of conflicting and competing versions of the one true faith. Myth and legend, all the more colourful elements of religion, especially in the Protestant countries, gradually disappeared and ritual dwindled, we may say, to a ghost of its former splendid self and in some areas, ritual was banished altogether. The fine arts became more and more secularised, the church became separated from the state, religion became divorced from secular life and it became more and more, a matter of private morality and personal feeling. In England, this trend was very much intensified during the Victorian period. The traditional religious doctrine of the origin of the universe and of man was very much undermined during the Victorian period as we all know by discoveries in the fields of geology and biology, in particular undermined by Darwin's theory of evolution and intellectually for many good serious, sincere people, religion, the Christian religion became more and more intellectually untenable. For some like Matthew Arnold, religion became simply morality tinged with emotion, as he calls it. The morality was often little more than social conformity and the emotion was very little more than a feeling of nostalgia for a lost faith. For others, we may say, religion became not morality tinged with emotion but rather emotion tinged with morality and as the decays went by, that emotion became less and less faintly tinged with morality. And it was at this point, say roughly 100 years ago, that Buddhism first really entered upon the scene. If we wanted a date we could fix upon 1870, I think it's three. Someone may correct me, perhaps it might be four. The year of the publication of Sir Edwin Arnold's celebrated poem, that really beautiful life of the Buddha, the light of Asia, sorry, '79, I've been corrected from the chair, '79. If we want to fix the date, let it be 1879. So we can already begin to see in what sort of way it was virtually inevitable that Buddhism would have been looked upon at that time. They would have been looked upon either as a system of ethics or as a particular kind of religious sentiment, as a particular kind of feeling as an experience. Buddhism would not, and in fact was not at that stage, taken very seriously as a doctrine, as a philosophy for one to a better word. The deaths of Buddhist thought were not plumbed at that time. They will not be gone even to be plumbed. And we're far from plumbing them even today, a hundred years later. And as for myth and legend, certainly in those days people were not ready to regard Buddhism or look upon Buddhism in those terms that had enough of Christian myth and legend which had been dressed up as historical fact. They were in no mood in those days for myth and legend, or for religion or Buddhism as myth and legend. And as for such things as ritual, festivals, social institutions, the whole more colorful and popular side of religion, Buddhism, they would have been regarded as simply out of the question even by the very, very few who thought of themselves in those days as Buddhists in this country. After all they might have said had not the Buddha, good Protestant that he was, condemned for rights and ceremonies as fetters. So some of these reasons for not regarding say Buddhism very seriously is dropped in or is legend or myth or ritual. Some of these remain unthinkable for Western Buddhists even today. So for many Buddhism becomes a matter still of ethics or of experience and therefore one tends to think of enlightenment as experience. It might even be said that one might well have predicted at the end of the last century which forms of Buddhism would be the most popular in Britain during the first half of the 20th century, Theravada and Zen, Theravada as representing the code of ethics and Zen as representing experience. Now in the second half of the 20th century we may say the Theravada has rather fallen behind as it were an independent school and Zen we may also say at least in some areas in some quarters is beginning to be displaced by something else. What that something else is may be seen later on. So so much for the way in which we regard religion, for the way in which we've come almost insensibly to think nowadays in the west of religion including Buddhism in terms of experience. Now what about the way in which we regard life itself? In other words the organized life of the human community, social life in the very widest sense along with its various aspects, political, economic, cultural, domestic. How do we feel about this? Now often it must be confessed that when it comes to life many of us don't feel very much at all. If we feel anything when it comes to life, if you like life with a capital L, life in general or just life, we feel confused. We feel bewildered, life is so very complicated or has become so very complicated and I'm sure many of us feel at times as though we had become caught up in a vast system, even a vast machine, which had become far too big and far too complex for us to understand or to do anything at all about. All sorts of things happen all over the world, all the time. We it seems have very little, sometimes absolutely no control over them, whatever, but there they are happening all the time, all over the world and we've no control over them, usually almost always, even when they most deeply and most intimately affect our own lives. In respect of those events, we are powerless, we're impotent, we can do nothing, we're helpless. The juggernaut of events, of world events, global events, rolls on, we can do nothing, even if the wheels are crushing us, crushing the life out of us, we can do nothing and very often that is the sort of feeling that we have about life, that we can do nothing. So we feel helpless, impotent, frustrated. At the same time, very often, for many of us, life seems a very dull and very routine affair. We go along, we rumble along or we creep along, tracks, which have been laid down for us, not by ourselves, but for us, before even we were born, perhaps before even our parents were born. You know the round school, you didn't ask to be sent to school, usually, school. Well, when school ends, well, what work? One form or another, one level, one another, then, inevitably, marriage. And as inevitably, for practically everybody after marriage, mortgage. And not quite so inevitably nowadays, of course, for reasons I need not mention, children. And of course, still more work, perhaps promotion, if you're lucky, which of course means more work again, and then retirement, redundancy, and death. And this, of course, is what life, ordinary life, social life, human life, means for most people, certainly for most men. I think the women sometimes at least have it a little easier than that. And apparently, words of protest are right accepted. And apparently, there's no alternative. The wheel has caught you. The wheel has got you in its grip, and it rolls on and on. I saw today, this just turns into my mind, a very striking picture, a painting in the Burn Jones exhibition. I think it was called the Wheel of Fortune. I think it should have been called the Wheel of Misfortune, a vast wheel, turns by a rather stern looking female figure, with helpless male figures strapped onto it. It was just turning and turning inevitably and inexorably. So this is what life means for most people, for men and, let us say, for women to, usually, unfortunately. Now, I've mentioned work, work in the sense of gainful employment. And it's quite a thought that we devote more time and more energy to work in this sense than to any other single activity in our lives, with, of course, one exception, sleep. And for only too many people, work is dull, repetitious, exhausting, and boring. There's no joy in it for them, for the people who do the work. No sense of fulfillment, no feeling or creativity, and no real outlet for their energies. Well, sometimes, as it were bursting with energy, but they can't put it into their work. That energy is not appropriate to their work, it's not needed in that work. So there's no outlet very often for their energies. So what is the result of all this? What is the result of this sort of experience of life? The result is the overall, the overriding effect is that people, too many of them these days, feel frustrated, they feel impotent, and they feel deep down, very resentful. But again, only too often, they are not in a position to express that resentment. The expression of a resentment only too often is the luxury that the worker cannot afford. These are often, of course, there's no one of them on anyway, and these vastly impersonal concerns, to vent it upon. Can't express the resentment without, and sometimes this does happen, engaging in criminal activities, criminal violence as a small minority of people sometimes do. So gradually, what happens is, gradually, we lose contact with our feelings, and when we lose contact with our feelings, we lose contact with ourselves. And when we lose contact with ourselves, we lose contact with life. We become dull, tired, mechanical, dead. We become walking corpses, zombies, and we all know this very well. We've seen it quite often enough. We've seen it at least something of it, to some extent, in our own selves, from time to time, and also in others. And that great point, that great visionary William Blake, saw it nearly 200 years ago, at the time of the grimy dawn of the Industrial Revolution in this country. And he says, "I wander through each chartered street, near where the chartered Thames does flow, and mark in every face I meet, marks of weakness, marks of woe. And we can see those same marks on the faces of the people in the tube as we go home tonight, marks of weakness, marks of woe, if we look. And the only difference is, 200 years after Blake, the only difference is that those marks are now, if anything, graven, deep. So the situation, we may say, is bad enough. But of course, we are human. We do have energy deep down, however perverted, however distorted, and we don't always take things lying down, and quite rightly so. We try to do something about the situation, something about our lives. So we look about us for something to relieve the border, to relieve the darkness, the sense of frustration. We look around us for something that will give us a bit of excitement, a bit of amusement at least, a bit of a thrill, something that will make us feel more alive, something that will take us out of ourselves, something that will help us forget everything at least for a while. So in this way, we turn to food, glorious food. We turn to sex, we turn to alcohol and other drugs. We turn, of course, to that famous institution, the TV sector. And we turn, in the case of some people, to the more expensive dress, or the bigger and better car, or the more powerful and noisy motorbike. And we turn, even, almost in desperation, to spectate us sports, including blood sports. I heard a woman on the radio saying that she lived for hair coursing. She loved to see it. It was the only thing in life she said worth living for. Life would be nothing without hair coursing, she said, and she said it over the radio. And in the same way, we turn to the passive, and I underline this, I emphasize this, the passive enjoyment of music and art. And we may even, as I suggested earlier on, turn to sadism and to violence. Turn to all sorts of things. We turn in our search for relief from our boredom, to all sorts of things, from the sublime to the sword, from Beethoven to Bingham. Now some of the things I've mentioned, of course, are not bad in themselves. It's the use that we make of them, which is bad. It's the use that we make of them that could be described probably as neurotic, or in more traditional Buddhist terminology, as unskillful. And because the use we make of these things, even those things which are not intrinsically so, because the use that we make of them is neurotic, is unskillful, they don't really work as reliefs for boredom and frustration. So in the long run, what happens? We feel more empty, more frustrated, and more drained, more exhausted than ever. Now there's no need to insist on this point. There's no need to flog the horse, as it were. In one form or another, to a greater or lesser extent, what I've been describing is a familiar phenomenon of modern life, of all of our lives, to some extent. So the way in which we regard life is rather ambivalent. On the one hand, we find life, we feel life, oppressive, burdensome, frustrating, stultifying. But on the other, we expect from life something that will alleviate that frustration. Expect something compensatory, expect an experience in the modern sense of this term. So we can now begin to see how the way in which we regard religion, and the way in which we regard life link up, does this common emphasis eventually on experience? And this is why it's as it were natural, almost inevitable, that we, too, think of enlightenment in terms of experience. We may say that for purely historical reasons, we are predisposed to think of religion, think of enlightenment in terms of experience. On account of the general nature of modern life, we're on the lookout, as it were, for experience and experience, the experience that will transport us out of that life, even out of ourselves, so that we're not only in a position of naturally thinking in terms of experience, we also have a neurotic need for experience as an alleviation of our boredom and frustration. So we come to place great emphasis on experience, we want experience, and we place this emphasis on experience why we place it because we are alienated from experience. Actually, we're experiencing all the time, everything is experience, why this emphasis on experience, why this need is craving for experience, that emphasis that isn't healthy, we emphasize experience, we crave for experience because we are in fact so alienated from experience. And this is true, again, to a greater or a lesser extent of quite a number of people nowadays. And it's true we may say of many who turn for their particular brand of experience to the various spiritual traditions of the world, including, perhaps especially, those of the East. We might even say it's particularly true of such people. How is this? Many such people have already tired, at least of some of the more usual forms of distraction. They found them wanting. Such people may, in some cases, even have dropped out of ordinary social life and economic life, perhaps altogether. Maybe because they were too weak to cope or too sensitive to cope. And now they're left, as it were, on their own, on their own, except, of course, in some cases, for the odd, famous relationship. And they feel dull, they feel empty, feel more dead than alive. And eventually, they feel that they can't stand it any longer. But willing to try anything to relieve this dullness and emptiness, this inner aching void. So they start haunting spiritual groups, religious and occult bookshops and even meditation classes. They take up astrology, they take up magic and witchcraft, white, black, grey, they take up occultism, the kabbalah, the Vedanta, Sufism, Taoism, take up also Buddhism. Take up anything that might take them out of themselves, anything that might give some meaning, some shadow of meaning, at least with their lives, anything that might give them an experience. Not so very long ago, I had quite an interesting experience. Nowadays, as many of you know, I don't live in the city of London. I've found a very quiet corner of England. I'm not going to tell you what corner it is, because I like it to remain quiet. But I don't very often come down to London, come down just occasionally. Not so very long ago on one of these visits, I happened to go along one afternoon to a rather well-known occult, an oriental bookshop in North London. And rather to my surprise, it was absolutely full of people, even though it was a weekday afternoon, absolutely full. And I noticed that all these people were totally oblivious to one another. They all had their eyes riveted, not to say glued, on the bookshelves, and quite a number of them were young people, and I couldn't help noticing, just as I sort of stood there on the threshold as it were, I couldn't help noticing that the whole place seems pervaded by a quite heavy, oppressive sort of atmosphere, which seems to me rather strange. And as I, you know, instantaneously reflected, I couldn't help wondering, well, where have I encountered this atmosphere before? So heavy, so oppressive, and suddenly it flashed on me, I remembered. Two years before, I'd been in a very large, very new department store in Plymouth, in the food section, and standing about almost like waxworks were a number of stout elderly women with shopping bags, and shopping baskets, they were all standing, you know, quite motionless, just gazing fixedly at the food, and they were gazing with what can only be described as dull reptilian greed. And it dawned on me that it was that same greed that I saw in the bookshop, that I felt in the bookshop, greed for experience, for tabula man, a neurotic craving, one might say, for experience. But at this point, I'd like to make a rather important distinction, a distinction between what I call attainment, and what I'd like to call acquisition. Appointment is the result of the gradual extension of our own real being and consciousness, an extension into higher levels and new dimensions, and this in a sense is a natural process. But acquisition is quite different. Acquisition I would define as the attempted appropriation of the higher level of the new dimension by and for ourselves as we at present are. And this is an unnatural and unrealistic because eventually unsuccessful process. It can't possibly succeed in the long run. Attainment is like the growth, like the gradual unfoldments and flowering of a healthy plant. Eventually the flower is produced, it comes forth upon the branch. But acquisition is like a plant that has stopped growing. So what do we do? Because the plant has stopped growing, we tie a flower onto it, a flower that has been stolen from somebody else's garden, from some other plant, or perhaps it's even a wax or a paper flower that we tie on. So the neurotic craving for higher spiritual experience, and I stress the neurotic craving. Not the deep genuine aspiration, the neurotic craving for higher spiritual experience is a form of acquisition. It's an attempt to tie onto the barren branches of our own lives. Somebody else's flower, even the Buddha's own golden flower. The flower of enlightenment. Attainment is just a matter of growing. Acquisition is a matter of grabbing. It's a sort of smashed and grabbed raid conducted on the absolute. But sometimes things are even worse than that. Sometimes people don't even grab. I thought there's a sort of spirit in grabbing, you know, there's a sort of baldness. You can't help grudgingly admiring the bank robber, for instance, in your weaker moments. But sometimes it's worse than grabbing. Sometimes people don't grab, even, they just expect. They lie back with their mouths as it were wide open. They adopt a completely passive attitude. They look upon the experience as something that has to be given to them, that has to be fed to them, something for which they don't have themselves to do anything at all. In fact, some of them in extreme cases even resent the idea that they should have to do anything at all. They think that spiritually speak, even enlightenment, wise as it were, the universe owes them a living. The universe owes them an experience, even the experience. Well, these are just some of the implications of thinking of enlightenment in terms of experience. And these implications are, in all conscience, serious enough. I must confess I brought them out in a rather extreme than not to say exaggerated form. And I've done this for definite reasons. In the first place, so that we can understand quite clearly what those implications are, the implications of that particular way of thinking, thinking in terms of experience, and also because the exaggeration could be of practical concern to all of us. All of us, that is, and I think that includes practically everybody present who turn for guidance to the Eastern spiritual traditions, particularly those who turn to Buddhism. After all, we've all inherited from our own indigenous, Western, Christian, post-Christian, cultural tradition a particular way of looking at things, a particular way of looking at religion, a way that very, very often emphasizes feeling and experience. And also, we're all, to a greater or lesser extent, affected by the modern world in which we live. We are the modern world, to some extent. So that to some extent, all of us are alienated, practically everybody sitting here, to some extent, is alienated. We are alienated from ourselves, and we're alienated from life. And we're all looking, therefore, for compensations. And therefore, it's clear, it must be clear, that we do approach Buddhism, those of us who do approach it, with very mixed motives indeed. Partly with healthy motives, no doubt. But partly also, with unhealthy and unskilled for motives. In principle, no doubt, each and every one of us would wish to think in terms of attainment, but only to often we act and behave in terms of acquisition. No doubt we would sincerely wish to grow, but only to often we end up simply trying to grab. So perhaps it would help, if quite consciously, we even stopped thinking in terms of experience, but at least as an experiment for a certain length of time, maybe weeks, months, years, stopped thinking in terms of experience, at all, and started thinking in terms of non-experience, started thinking even of enlightenment itself as non-experience. We'll see what this means in a minute. First, I just want to draw your attention briefly to some of the more disastrous consequences of the kind of attitude that I've been describing, thinking in terms of experience, thinking of religion, enlightenment, in terms of experience, and this will highlight the dangers to the spiritual life in thinking in this sort of way, and also underline I hope the desirability of an alternative approach. Now if our attitude is one of neurotic craving, if we are passive and demanding, if we expect to be given a spiritual experience, then our expectation will take at least three forms. To expect the experience to come from somewhere, or from some one, or from some a thing, possibly from a combination of all three, an unaccount of this threefold expectation, the expectation of an experience being given to us from somewhere, some one, some thing, we fall victim to three sindromes. We can call these the sindromes of pseudo-spiritual exoticism, pseudo-spiritual projection and pseudo-spiritual technism. They want to devote just a few words to each of these in turn, and then turn two more positive matters. First of all, pseudo-spiritual exoticism. We expect this great experience to come from far away. In other words, from as far away from us as possible, we sometimes expect this experience to come from outer space, at least from the east. That is if we live in the west. If we live in the east, and if we suffer from this same sindrom, we expect it to come from the west. I remember reading about some young Japanese Buddhists. They said that they liked to sing Protestant Christian hymns in their temple, and when they were asked why they said, "They were so exotic," but we do just the same sort of thing. For instance, Buddhism itself is of Eastern origin, historically speaking. We can't get wrong that fact, and it comes to us more often than not wearing an Eastern dress, an Eastern garb, not as a Eastern decorations. Most of us wearing Buddhism comes to us wearing an Indian dress, or a Japanese dress, or a Tibetan dress, a very beautiful, attractive, glamorous and fascinating dress, and we really are fascinated by this dress in which Buddhism comes to us. And very often, if we're not careful, we are more interested in the dress than in what is inside the dress. That is to say, Buddhism itself as a universally valid spiritual teaching, a teaching which in its essence is neither of the east nor of the west, but for all time and all space, for man, for all forms of sentient life even. If we're not very careful, we think that Buddhism is the dress. We think that if we can only get hold of a little scrap of this dress, a little relic as it were, then everything will be all right. And I'm sorry to say that some Eastern teachers, or perhaps I should say some teachers coming from the east and purporting to teach, encourage this sort of attitude, encourage this sort of tendency. It makes them feel good. It flatters even sometimes, we may say quite bluntly, their own nationalistic prejudices. They too, in the course of centuries, have come to think that the dress is Buddhism or the dress is Vedanta or the dress is Sufism as the case may be. But pseudo-spiritual exoticism doesn't stop even here, there are quite a few more ramifications. Some people start thinking, start saying that east is good and west is bad. The east is spiritual idea, spiritual. The west is grossly materialistic. They even speak, and I read this in a book in so many words, just a few weeks ago, that there are two different minds. There's an Eastern mind and a Western mind. The Eastern mind of course is a highly spiritual mind, whereas the Western mind is a grossly materialistic mind. Now this we may say is an absolute travesty of the facts. Of course, there are highly spiritual teachings in the east, especially so far as Buddhism is concerned. And of course, we can learn from these teachings. Of course, we can be, we should be immensely grateful and thankful that we've been brought into contact with them. And our concern with them should be a concern with truth, not a concern with the exotic. So secondly, the pseudo-spiritual projection. Here we expect the experience to come not from just somewhere else, but from someone else. You know that personal relationships are usually much more intense, much more loaded than non-personal ones. And hence this particular sign drum is much more dangerous than the last. The person from whom we expect the experience is of course the great guru. You yourself have to do nothing. All you have to do, miserable wretch that you are, is to believe in him. Believe that he can give you the experience. Just like that, just give it. Of course, the experience can't be given by just an ordinary man, not even by an ordinary one of the male guru. They can be given only by a very great guru, indeed, a guru who is God, or equivalent, but the very lowest, a guru who is the incarnation of God, the representative of God on this earth. So otherwise, you don't get your experience, if you don't believe that. Not only that, because you need to believe so much in this particular person is great guru, you cannot tolerate, you cannot entertain a doubt. You cannot tolerate any criticism of your great guru, and criticism is understood as anything that doesn't accept him as God. That's criticism. Everybody has got to believe in him just as you do. If necessary, they must be made to believe. It's all for their own good, anyway. But how do you know that the great guru is God, or Buddha, or enlightened? How do you know that? Well, of course, you know, it is quite easy, it's quite simple, because he says so. And in this way, a very dangerous situation develops, which can be summarized as the bigger the claim the great guru makes, the more likely it is that some people will believe him. They are to say the people who need to believe, and there are quite a lot of such people about nowadays who need to believe in this sort of way, and the great guru therefore very quickly wakes together quite a large following. Of course, sometimes people do try to turn even an ordinary guru into the great guru. They see more in him than is actually there. He may be a good man, he may be an experienced man, but they see in him, on him, more than is objectively there. In other words, they project, and in some cases, the guru, if he isn't quite all that he should be, succumbs to their projections. Sometimes he doesn't, but if he doesn't, then very often the followers are very disappointed. They feel rather let down, they may even become angry if he refuses to accept their projections. If he refuses to allow them to build him up into the great guru, so they leave him, they continue their search for the great guru, for someone in whom they can believe, someone who will give them the experience that they want, or at least promise to give it. Now all this is very sad. I must say, quite frankly, that sometimes when I hear of certain things, I can't help feeling deeply ashamed, ashamed of what is sometimes, and nowadays increasingly often being done in the name of the Eastern religions, even in the name of Buddhism, ashamed of the way in which the weak-minded and the credulous are being deceived and exploited by all sorts of personalities, peripatetic around the world. The guru globe trotters of the 20th century, it's much worse in the US than it is here. It's not all that bad in common sense, Britain, not all that bad. It's much worse in the states. Not so long ago, I just happened to be turning over a copy of a fringe newspaper published somewhere in California. They always seemed to be published somewhere in California, and it was full of announcements of buying about from great gurus. They were all advertising themselves like so many brands of soap powder, all making tremendous claims, all asking for support, for belief. And it's against this sort of thing that we have to guard ourselves. And guarding ourselves means seeing where the source of the trouble lies, it isn't in the great gurus so much, it's in ourselves. In our own weakness, our own passivity, our own wish to have things done for us, our own neurotic craving, for experience and experience that somebody else must give us as a free gift, instead of we ourselves growing into it as a result of our own individual responsible effort and exhaustion. All right, thirdly and lastly, zero spiritual mechanism. This consists in attaching exaggerated importance to particular methods of practice, especially particular methods of meditation, particular concentration techniques. We think that if we can only find the right one, the technique, the method, the one infallible one, it'll automatically give us the experience. Sometimes we think of course we have found the right one, and we become very dogmatic and very intolerant about that. We want to dismiss or we try to dismiss all other methods as worthless, useless, only our own technique, only the method that we ourselves have recourse to is the right one, the good one, the only one that is of any use. And we forget that there are so many different methods of meditation, so many different concentration techniques, especially in Buddhism. Buddhism is very rich in this field and all of them work. Every single one of them has been tried and tested for centuries. Every single one of them works, provided one practice system. One method may be more suited to a particular temperament or a particular stage of development, but we can never say that any one method is intrinsically better than any other. In the course of my own experience in the West, I have encountered pseudo-spiritual technism on quite a number of occasions. I have encountered it. I certainly encountered it when I first came back to this country ten years ago, as Mr. Humphrey has reminded me, I certainly encountered it in connection with what used to be called at least the vipassana meditation. And I am sorry to say that I have also encountered it in connection with Zen. Some practitioners of these methods, and I must emphasize some, nor all, taint, I am sorry to say, to be rather contemptuous of other forms of meditation practice. And think, if one is not practicing their particular favorite method, one is not meditating at all. And this attitude is very unfortunate, it only serves to encourage neurotic overvaluation of one particular technique. Well, so much for our three sindrums, so much for the consequences of thinking of religion, thinking of enlightenment, to literally and to exclusively in terms of experience. So what is the alternative? The alternative, of course, is to think of it in terms of non-experience. Non-experience, and we do find some trace of this way of thinking in the Paulian and the Paulish scriptures. For instance, in the Paulish scriptures, say the dhammapada we encounter this expression, in this phrase, nirvana is the supreme bliss, nirbanang paramang sukank, nirvana is the supreme bliss. So the question that arises is, what difference is there between this bliss, the bliss of nirvana, and ordinary bliss, worldly bliss, even heavenly bliss. What difference is there between the two, nirvana-ic bliss, an ordinary bliss, non-nirvana-ic bliss. And in course of time the answer came forth that worldly bliss is the kind of bliss that depends upon contact. Contact between the sense objects and the mind on the one hand and their respective physical and mental objects on the other, worldly bliss arises independent on some sort of contact, some sort of object coming in contact with some sort of subject. So we could say that worldly bliss depends on one experience, worldly bliss is a form of experience, but we are told, nirvana-ic bliss is not so dependent, nirvana-ic bliss does not arise in dependence upon any sort of contact at all, nirvana-ic bliss is not the product of contact, when all contact sees that is nirvana, that is the bliss of nirvana. So nirvana is not an experience, we can only describe it as a non-experience, nirvana is the experience you have when you stop experiencing. Nirvana or experience is also described in terms of cessation, nirhoda, as the entire, the complete, the remainder less cessation of the conditioned. And so far as we are concerned, that means cessation of experience, for all our experience is conditioned. We don't know any other kind of experience, we know only conditioned experience, we do not know unconditioned experience, for us unconditioned experience is a contradiction in terms of logical impossibility. So to the extent that we think of nirvana or enlightenment or cessation, therefore we must think of it as non-experience. But here we may say, we stand on the Everest and the crunch and jungle of Buddhism. And here the air is very clear, but the air is also very cold, for most of us. So perhaps we better go a little lower down, perhaps we better try to find some other alternative to thinking of enlightenment in terms of non-experience, some other alternative to thinking of religion, something more positive, something more concrete, something more helpful to the genuine fulfillment of our own real human needs. Now I am going to suggest that one alternative, but three, all very closely linked. Some of them, I am afraid, may not be very popular nowadays, the three alternative ways of thinking of religion as non-experience, I am going to suggest our growth, work and beauty, and I will say just a few words about each and then conclude. First of all growth, growth, one could also say growing. The image, the form of growing is of course the plant, and plant imagery we know figures very prominently in Buddhism, very prominently in Buddhist tradition and literature and teaching. See of the Buddha's initial vision of humanity when he sat under that bodhi tree after the enlightenment, if enlightenment has an after, and he looked out over the whole world. He saw the whole of humanity, and how did he see them? He saw them, we are told, as a great bed of lotuses, stretching in all directions, lotuses in different stages of development, some sunk down in the mud, some half way up through the water, some risen to the surface, some standing in the sunlight with open petals drinking in the light of the sun. He saw all living beings in this way as plants, lotuses in different stages of development. And we may say that this great vision, this great vision of humanity as a bed of lotus plants, this great vision stayed with Buddhism throughout its 2500 years of history. We know that in Buddhism in the course of centuries upon centuries, there were many great philosophical developments. We know that in all conscience they were sometimes dry and abstract enough. We know there was much of scholasticism, much of formalism, cracked into Buddhism later on, but Buddhism never forgot, never in any area, in any part of the Buddhist world quite forgot. At any time, the Buddha's great vision of the bed of lotuses standing there in the early morning sunlight, as he saw after his enlightenment, Buddhism never forgot the image of growth, of growing, and the image assumed many different forms. We think for instance of the lotus throne, that many petal lotus throne on which buddhas and transcendental bodhisattvas innumerable set and teach and meditate and radiate. We think of the refuge tree, that great tree, that great lotus tree with a central trunk and four great branches, on all of which are many tiered, many petal lotus flowers on which again sit, buddhas, bodhisattvas, arahans, gurus, yidams and darkenese, and we think perhaps above all of the white lotus sutra's great parable of the herbs and the plants, also known as the parable of the rain cloud. This parable or the buddha in this parable sees humanity as being like plants of many different kinds, not just all lotuses even, but all sorts, all kinds of plants, shrubs, trees, herbs, grass, large and small, simple and complex, and when the rain of the dharma falls out of that thundering rain cloud, in the midst of the sky, when the rain of the dharma falls with universal refreshment, then they all grow, all those plants, all those trees, herbs, shrubs, grasses, but they all grow and here is the great addition to the teaching in this parable, they all grow in their own way. According to their own individual natures, the grass becomes still more beautiful grass, the tree becomes a more abundant and many leaves tree, the flower becomes a still more beautiful flower, the shrub, a more splendid shrub, they all grow according to their own individual natures in this great parable of the white lotus sutra, when they receive the rain of the dharma. So no need to multiply examples, this is an aspect of the dharma that I've dealt with more than once before. So we can say, I think, that there are quite a number of advantages in thinking of religion, if we do have to use that word on Frankly, I'd rather not, thinking of it in terms of growth rather than in terms of experience, in seeing ourselves, feeling ourselves as plants, drinking in the dharma like the rain. Growth is a total thing, all of us is growing all at the time. It should be great, there's no question of working our way up to growth, the process is absolutely continuous, growth doesn't lie at the end or only at the end of the process. If we are working our way up, we are growing, all effort is growth. Then again to use that word, the spiritual life is or is like the plant. An enlightenment is the flower. In a sense, the flower is separate from the plant. But also in another sense, perhaps not another sense, the flower is part of the plant. The flower is a natural product, the combination of the growth of the plant itself. It cannot be stuck onto the plant from outside prematurely before the plant has reached the appropriate stage of development when the flower naturally comes forth. So the plant we may also say is the path and the flower is the goal. And you can reach the goal only by following the path. You cannot grab the goal as if it were apart from following the path. The goal is no more separate from the path than the flower is separate from the plant. A great image out of the plant and the flower. But images, however beautiful, however appropriate, also have their limitations. All right, we are plants. We grow. We burst into bloom even. We gain enlightenment, but a flower fades. A flower loses its petals. But the spiritual life is not like that. So we have to stretch our imaginations quite a bit further. We have to expand and develop our image. And we have to say that when the flower of enlightenment blooms, that flower does not fade. Its petals do not fall. The rest of the plant may drop away. The stalk, the leaves, but that flower remains, remains on its own, remains as it were suspended in the sky, floating. You could even say that the whole plant had become flower. Moreover, this flower, like other flowers, contains seeds. And as that flower is suspended there, floats there in the sky, in the heavens, those seeds grow into plants. All those plants produce flowers, and all those flowers too remain suspended, floating in the sky, in the heavens, so that eventually as this process continues and continues and continues throughout infinity and eternity, the whole of space becomes filled with flowers. This is the kind of vision we see in some kinds of meditation. The whole of space filled with a vast network of flowers, great flowers, golden lotus flowers, and all the time that network is expanding. It's expanding to infinity in all directions, that great golden network of lotus flowers. That's what the Buddhist life is really like. Anyway, time we came down to earth, back to a sense of space and time. Time we got back to the plant. Time we got back to the individual, struggling to grow, back that it is to say to ourselves. As the parable of the herbs and plants reminds us, the plant needs rain. But it needs quite a number of other things too. If it is to grow, it needs sunshine, it needs perhaps wind, it needs soil. With everything that the soil contains, it needs even so humble a thing as manure. Maybe it needs a bit of pruning from time to time, a bit of trimming, or protection from creepy crawly things, or protection from wild animals. It may even, if it is not too proud to disdain the aid, it may need even a stick to support it for a while. In other words, growth depends on a complex of favorable conditions, and this brings us to a very important point indeed. To the point to the fact that we need to situate this business of growth, this process of growth within a wider and ever wider context. And this means, again, a much fuller and richer conception of Buddhism itself. Buddhism is not just ethics, not just meditation. Great and important as meditation is. Buddhism is a lot more things than those two. Buddhism is a doctrine, a teaching, even a philosophy, it's a myth, a whole series of great myths. It's a body of legends, it's social institutions, it's festivals and celebrations, it's art, or the art, it's ritual, and it's work. And as Buddhist, we need to be nourished by all of these things. We may need more of some than of others, depending, of course, on the kind of clench we are. And in the same way, we need, as Mr. Humphreys suggested in the course of his opening remarks, we need all the different forms of Buddhism, not in the rather mutually exclusive, occasionally sectarian form in which they exist in at least some parts of the East. We need what is essential in the more, what is basic in the more, what is living in the more, what is nourishing in the more, to us as we try to grow in the light of Buddhism here in the West. Perhaps the triyana Buddhism of Tibet offers us a model here. Tibetan Buddhism is unprecedentedly rich, but of course, in the case of Tibetan Buddhism, there is the danger of exoticism, the danger that will be drawn more by the colorful God up than by the living universal spiritual essence. And in any case, of course, it is significant that Tibetan Buddhism, at least in some quarters, has begun perhaps to replace Zen as the single most popular form of Buddhism in the West. Europe and America. It's a sign, perhaps, that Western Buddhists no longer get sufficient nourishment, either from the dry bones of contemporary terravada or the cold tea leaves of modern Zen. Perhaps, and this is only a suggestion, perhaps the Tian Thai Buddhism of China would be an even better model for us and to us than Tibetan Buddhism. And of course, the Tian Thai Buddhism of China continued in Japan as the 10th day tradition, one of the smallest schools there today, is not triyana, it is ekayana. Not three ways, even though convergent, but one from the beginning, in principle. However, there's no time to explore all this this evening, let's pass on to the subject of work. Freedom is getting very short, we just have to deal with this very much more briefly. Well, by work I don't mean gainful employment, don't mean wage slavery, I mean the productive expenditure of energy, this is the true, the noble meaning of the word work, the productive expenditure of energy, which is a happy and a joyful and a creative thing. And work in this is exactly the precise opposite of passivity, and inactivity, and expecting, is the direct opposite of the neurotic craving for experience. So that if we work, we should grow, if we work productively, but what is the most productive kind of work, the most productive kind of work, the most productive kind of expenditure of energy, is work for the dharma, if possible, full of time work. And work for the dharma doesn't just mean giving lectures and taking classes out front, not everybody is equipped to do that. We may say, proclaim for the dharma, cooking and cleaning for the dharma, painting for the dharma, raising funds for the dharma, typing for the dharma, this is all work for the dharma, a productive expenditure of energy through which you grow and grow rapidly. And for work of this sort, we need a wider and wider context, especially when many of us are involved, and that wider context is the Sangha. The spiritual community in the wider sense, not just those who are technically and officially monks, the whole spiritual community, all those who are treading the path of the Buddha. And at the beginning of this lecture, I did say that Buddhism consists of two things, the path and the goal, for the goal and the path, the Buddha and the dharma. But there's also this third thing, which I didn't mention at the beginning of the lecture, and that third thing is the Sangha or spiritual community. The community of all those who are seeking to attain the goal, those who are treading the path, who are growing, who are working, working for the dharma and working together. And this brings me to our third and last alternative, duty, not a very pleasant or very popular word very often in the years of the current generation, duty. But what is one's duty? It's your right to speak in terms of duty, but what is one's duty? What is the duty of a Buddhist? What is the duty of one who has gone for refuge? What is the duty of a member of the spiritual community? One's only duty is to work, to do whatever can reasonably, or in some cases, in some circumstances, unreasonably expected of one in the situation in which one actually is. Let me quote Gerta here. One of my favorite authors to quote, Gerta said, "What is thy duty? The claims of the day, but let me add the claims of the larger day, the wider context." And as Gerta also says, "How can a man learn to know himself?" And he answers his own question in this way. You can learn to know himself, he says, "Never by meditating," and he will say he means by meditating reflecting, "Never by meditating, but by doing. Endeavor to do thy duty, and thou will to once know what in thee lies." And if we do our duty as Buddhists, if we work as Buddhists, work for the Dharma, we will know ourselves as Buddhists. In fact, as time goes on eventually, we shall know ourselves as Buddhists. We will gain enlightenment, gain enlightenment as experience, gain enlightenment as non-experience, and both. I mean, tonight. [music] . . [BLANK_AUDIO]