The World as Emptiness, Part 7: A Finger Pointing at the Moon

Here is the point: if you believe, if you have certain propositions that you want to assert about the ultimate reality—or what Paul Tillich calls ‘the ultimate ground of being’—you are talking nonsense. Because you can’t say something specific about everything.

You see, supposing you wanted to say, “God has a shape.” But if God is all that there is, then God doesn’t have any outside, so he can’t have a shape. You have to have an outside, and space outside it, to have a shape. So that’s why the Hebrews, too, are against people making images of God. But nonetheless, Jews and Christians persistently make images of God, not necessarily in pictures and statues, but they make images in their minds. And those are much more insidious images.

Buddhism is not saying that the Self—the great Ātman, or whatnot—it isn’t denying that the experience which corresponds to these words is realizable. What it is saying is that if you make conceptions and doctrines about these things, you’re liable to become attached to them. You’re liable to start believing instead of knowing.

So they say in Zen Buddhism, “The doctrine of Buddhism is a finger pointing at the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the moon.” Or so we might say in the West, the idea of God is a finger pointing at God, but what most people do is, instead of following the finger, they suck it for comfort. And so Buddha chopped off the finger and undermined all metaphysical beliefs. There are many, many dialogues in the Pali scriptures where people try to corner the Buddha into a metaphysical position. “Is the world eternal?” The Buddha says nothing. “Is the world not eternal?” And he answers nothin’. “Is the world both eternal and not eternal?” And he don’t say nothin’. “Is the world neither eternal nor not eternal?” And still, he don’t say nothin’. He maintains what is called the noble silence. Sometimes, later, called the thunderous silence—because this silence, this metaphysical silence, is not a void. It is very powerful. This silence is the open window through which you can see not concepts, not ideas, not beliefs, but the very goods. But if you say what it is that you see, you erect an image and an idol, and you misdirect people. It’s better to destroy people’s beliefs than to give them beliefs. I know it hurts, but it is The Way. That is what cracks the eggshell and lets out the chick. Of course, if you want to stay in the eggshell, you can. But you’ll get addled.

This, then, you see, is why Buddhism is in dialogue form: the truth cannot be told. It can be suggested, it can be indicated, and a method of interchange between teacher and student can be arranged whereby the teacher constantly pricks the student’s bubbles. And that’s what it’s all about. And because that’s the way it is, we find that, in the course of history, Buddhism keeps changing. It develops, it grows. As people make all these explorations that the original Buddha suggested, they find out all kinds of new things, they explore the mind, they find out all the tricks of the mind, they—oh, they find out ever so many things, and they begin to teach these things; talk about them.

And some people, influenced by—in modern Asia—influenced by Protestantism, say, “Let’s go back to the simple, original teachings of the Buddha!” See, like people say, “Let’s get back to the simple teachings of Jesus.” Well, the simple teachings of Jesus are as lost as lost can get. Nobody can read the New Testament with a clean mind today, because, whenever you look at the Bible, don’t you hear some preacher’s voice in your childhood, reading those words? Hasn’t your culture taught you to interpret these words in certain ways? You can’t get back. And nobody can get back to Buddha. You can only go on to Buddha. So that’s why, in Zen, they just burn the books up. I mean, occasionally. Because to burn up books, you’ve got to have some books to burn up.

But when, you know, you can say, “The teaching of the founder is the thing.” This is terrible. It’s like the oak suddenly saying one day, “Hey, we oughtn’t have all these leaves around here. We ought to be just that simple little acorn.” No, a living tradition grows. And what it does is this: as it grows—say, it grew from a seed; an acorn—it keeps dropping off new acorns. You don’t go back to the old acorn, you get a new one. And that becomes a new seed for another tree. This is fine.

Now, let me just warn you: the scholarly study of Buddhism is a magnum opus beyond belief. There are two collections of Buddhist canonical scriptures. One is in Pali, the other was originally in Sanskrit, but we don’t have a complete collection of it in Sanskrit. We have these collections in Tibetan and Chinese. Bigger than the Encyclopædia Britannica, as a matter of fact. So it’s a formidable enterprise to get into the Buddhist scriptures, and what’s more, most of them are unbelievably boring. They were written by monks with plenty of time to pass on wet afternoons during the monsoon, and they repeat, and they elaborate, and they are full of kind of preparatory—you know how, in the silly trick in radio they have, in giving a fanfare to introduce the program—so in the same way, these scriptures have fanfares in which all sorts of buddhas are introduced, and beings, and they’re all described, and where they were assembled, and how many of them there were, and where they were sitting, and what kind of bows they made, and all this jazz. And then, finally, a few pearls of wisdom are dropped by the Buddha—or else, they sometimes go on for pages, and pages of—actually—very, very subtle and very profound discourse that is not dull if you have a penchant for that kind of thing. But I warn you: don’t try too hard to read the Buddhist scriptures. It’s alright to read the Dhammapada, which are sayings of the Buddha. It’s alright to read the Diamond Sūtra. It’s alright, even, to read the Śūraṅgama Sūtra or the Laṅkāvatāra, but when you get mixed up with the larger Prajñāpāramitā, and all those things, you’re in deep water.

So you see, from time to time, Buddhists get tired of the scriptures. Actually, they keep them in a revolving bookcase in some monasteries. A thing about so high, so wide; it revolves. And instead of reading all this stuff, you’re supposed to be able to acquire as much merit as you would from reading it all by twirling the bookcase around once. In Zen monasteries, they have an annual ceremony for reading the scriptures. But they are printed like an accordion. In other words, the pages are connected to each other zig-zag. And then they have board on the back and the front, so that you can pick one up and go, “Whrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” like that, you know? Like a slinky moves. And so, each monk is assigned a pile of the volumes—this happens once a year—and they all chant sections of the scripture. But very often, each monk chants a different one. And while they’re doing this they pick up a volume and go “Whrrrrrrrrrrrrr, click,” and put it down on the other side. Pick up the next one, “Whrrrrrrrrrrr, click.” And this is the annual reading of the scriptures. There’s a wonderful picture of this being done in Suzuki’s book The Training of a Zen Buddhist Monk.

So, you see, Buddhists are funny about scriptures. They don’t treat them the way Christians treat the Bible. They respect them, they occasionally read them, but they feel that the writing, the written word, is purely incidental. It is not the point. And, indeed, it can be a very serious obstacle. Zhuang Zhou, a Taoist sage, once said, “Just as a dog is not considered a good dog just for being a good barker, a man is not considered a good man just for being a good talker.” So we have to watch out for the traps of words.