The Web of Life, Part 12: The Sound of Rain Needs No Translation

Now, summing up, we've discussed the web from three points of view. As an analogy of the selective operation of our senses and mind, whereby certain things in the world are picked out as significant according to certain game rules. The game that we are playing, mostly, is the survival game. That is to say, the game ought to go on. Only, the way we play the survival game has a kind of element in it which makes it difficult, because we tend to say, The first rule of this game is that it's serious, and that messes the whole thing up. So you have to watch out, in other words—when you play—for contradictory game rules. Self-contradictory game rules. Because if you get mixed up into them, the game ceases to be worth the candle. You start straining at doing something when it just isn't worth it.

Then, the second thing that we observed was the web as an analogy of mutual interdependence. We could call it the idea that all existence is relative, that all existence is transactional. The transaction being typically exemplified by, say, the operation of buying and selling, in which there can be no buying without somebody selling, and there can be no selling without somebody else buying. That kind of interdependence of the inside going together with the outside, what is in you going together with what is outside you, is absolutely fundamental to existence. It is existence. Existence is relativity.

Then we explored the web as a trap. The spider's web: Won't you come into my parlor? said the spider to the fly. And we saw what happens if you look at all of life from the point of view that it is original selfishness and original hunger. And we found that if you take that point of view to its ultimate extreme, it dissolves. And it isn't so bad after all. There's a famous comment that R. H. Blyth made on the passage in Macbeth, where Shakespeare says, It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And Blyth says, When it's put that way it doesn't seem so bad after all.

I remember that I had a Zen master friend who wrote a letter to a friend of mine, which was passed on to me, saying that the greatest writers—this friend of mine was aspiring to be a writer, and he was trying to write novels that would put across Buddhism to people. You know, sugar the pill. And my Zen master friend didn't approve of this at all. He said, Don't write any story to people. Write it to the great sky. Because all the real masters of literature, especially novelists and storytellers, are great masters of nonsense. Think of Lewis Carroll. You can use Lewis Carroll—and he did use Alice in Wonderland—as a Zen textbook: Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. And that's Zen.

I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, on the last visit there, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English. And he said that's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, he said, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary. Because, he said, the sound of the rain needs no translation. So what does the rain say? Evening rain. It is the banana leaf that speaks of it first. You see, that's the point. And all the talk in the world doesn't get it unless you listen to the talk in a new way. The sound of the rain needs no translation.

So, you see, there's something going on. This web may be looked at as pattern. And the world is basically patterning. What else do you do, when you come to think of it? When you eat you are turning food into the pattern of your skeleton, your muscles, and your nervous system. That's a pattern. And you say, you see—basically—Hooray for that pattern! That's great! It's terribly interesting! But then you want other patterns. You like to look through a microscope and see the patterns that exist in the small world. You like to look through a kaleidoscope, or a telidoscope, and see the patterns. You like to have paintings around and see the patterns. You like to watch the water play. You want to watch the birds go, and the clouds, and all that. Fascinating patterns. And that really does, doesn't it, seem to be the point.

I mean, what do you do when you're very rich and you want—let's take some rascal from ancient times who became very rich by all sorts of skullduggery, and warfare, and so on: he got himself a suit of armor, a beautiful sword. And he had the armorer make the most intricate patterns, arabesques of inlaid gold, on the steel. Why? Because it's, as they say among the Pennsylvania Dutch, it's f'nice. It's a great thing to have all that jazz, and that's what we go for.