in the opposite way so as to arrive at the middle way. So this emphasis on life as suffering is simply saying that the problem we are dealing with is that we hurt. We human beings feel pretty unfairly treated because we are born into a world arranged so that the price we pay for enjoying it, for having sensitive bodies, is that these bodies are capable of the most excruciating agonies. Isn’t that a nasty trick to play on us? What are we going to do about it? This is the problem.
When the Buddha says, “The cause of suffering is desire,” the word translated as desire might better be something like “craving,” “clinging,” or “grasping.” He is saying, “I’m suggesting that you suffer because you desire.” Then suppose you try not to desire, and see if by not desiring you can cease from suffering. You could put the same thing in another way by saying to a person, “It’s all in your mind. There is nothing either good or ill, but thinking makes it so.” Therefore, if you can control your mind you have nothing else that you need control. You do not need to control the rain if you can control your mind. If you get wet it is only your mind that makes you think it’s uncomfortable to be wet. A person who has good mental discipline can be perfectly happy wandering around in the rain. You do not need a fire if you have good mind control. But if you have ordinary, bad mind control, when it is cold you start shivering because you are putting up a resistance to the cold; you are fighting it. But don’t fight it, relax to the cold, as a matter of mental attitude, and then you will be fine. Always control your mind. This is another way of approaching it.
As soon as the student begins to experiment with these things, he finds out that it is not so easy as it sounds. Not only is it very difficult not to desire, or to control your mind, but there is something phony about the whole business. This is exactly what you are intended to discover—that when you try to eliminate desire in order to escape from suffering, you desire to escape from suffering. You are desiring not to desire. I am not merely playing with logic but saying that a person who is escaping from reality will always feel the terror of it. It will be like the hound of heaven that pursues him. In a way he is escaping even when he tries not to escape. This is the point that this method of teaching was supposed to educate about and draw out from you. The first step is not to explain all this to you but to make the experiment not to desire, or the experiment to control your mind thoroughly. To understand this, you must go through some equivalent of that so as to come to the point where you see you are involved in a vicious circle. In trying to control your mind, the motivation is still clinging and grasping, still self-protection, lack of trust and love. When this is understood, the student returns to the teacher and says, “This is my difficulty, I cannot eliminate desire because my effort to do so is itself desire. I cannot eliminate selfishness because my reasons for wanting to be unselfish are selfish.”
As one of the Chinese Buddhist classics puts it, “When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” Right means are all the traditional disciplines you use. You practice zazen and make yourself into a buddha. But if you are not a buddha in the first place, you cannot become one, because you will be the wrong man. You are using the right means, but because you are using them for a selfish or fearful intent, you are afraid of suffering; you do not like it and you want to escape. These motivations frustrate the right means. One is meant to find that out.
In time, as this was thoroughly explored by the Buddha’s disciples, there developed a very evolved form of this whole dialectic technique, which was called Madhyamika, meaning the middle way. It was a form of Buddhist practice and instruction developed by Nagarjuna, who lived in approximately 200 A.D. Nagarjuna’s method is simply an extension to logical conclusions of the method of dialogue that already existed, except that Nagarjuna took it to an extreme. His method is simply to undermine and cast doubts on any proposition to which his student clings, to destroy all intellectual formulations and conceptions, whatsoever, about the nature of reality or the nature of the self.
You might think this was simply a parlor game, a little intellectual exercise. But if you engaged in it you would find it was absolutely terrifying, bringing you very close to the verge of madness, because a skillful teacher in this method reduces you to a shuddering state of total insecurity. I have watched this being done among people you would consider perfectly ordinary, normal Westerners, who thought they were just getting involved in a nice, abstract intellectual discussion. Finally the teacher, as the process goes on, discovers in the course of the discussion what are the fundamental premises to which every one of his students is clinging. What is the foundation of sanity? What do you base your life on? When he has found that out for each student, he destroys it. He shows you that you cannot found a way of life on that, that it leads you into all sorts of inconsistencies and foolishness. The student turns back to the teacher and says, “It’s all very well for you to pull out all carpets from under my feet; what would you propose instead?” And the teacher says, “I don’t propose anything.” He’s no fool. He doesn’t put up something to be knocked down. But here you are; if you do not put up something to be knocked down, you cannot play ball with the teacher. You may say, “I don’t need to.” But on the other hand, there is something nagging you inside, saying that you do. So you go play ball with him, and he keeps knocking down whatever you propose, whatever you cling to.
This exercise produces in the individual a real traumatic state. People get acute anxiety that you would not expect if it were seen as nothing more than a very intellectual and abstract discussion. When it really gets down to it, and you find that you do not have a single concept you can really trust, it’s the heebie-jeebies. But you are preserved from insanity by the discipline, by the atmosphere set up by the teacher, and by the fact that he seems perfectly happy without anything in the way of a concept to cling to. The student looks at him and says, “He seems to be all right; maybe I can be all right too.” This gives a certain confidence, a certain feeling that all is not mad, because the teacher in his own way is perfectly normal.
THE MIDDLE WAY
CHAPTER TWO
I want to emphasize that the religions of the Far East—Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism—do not require a belief in anything specific. They do not require obedience to commandments from above, and they do not require conformity to any specific rituals. Their objective is not ideas or doctrines, but rather a method for the transformation of consciousness, and our sensation of self.
I emphasize the word sensation because it is the strongest word we have for direct feeling. When you put your hand on the corner of a table you have a very definite feeling, and when you are aware of existing, you also have a definite feeling. But in the view of the methods or disciplines of the East, our ordinary feeling of who we are and how we exist is a hallucination. To feel oneself as a separate ego, a source of action and awareness entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world, locked up inside a bag of skin, is in the view of the East a hallucination. You are not a stranger on the earth who has come into this world as the result of a fluke of nature, or as a spirit from somewhere outside nature altogether. In your fundamental existence you are the total energy of this universe playing the game of being you. The fundamental game of the world is the game of hide-and-seek. The colossal reality, the unitary energy that is the universe, plays at being many: it manifests itself as all these particulars around us. This is the fundamental intuition of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism.
Buddhism originated in northern India close to the area that is now Nepal, shortly after 600 B.C. A young prince by the name of Gautama Siddhartha became the man we call the Buddha. “Buddha” is a title based on the Sanskrit root budh, which means to be awake. A buddha is an individual who has awakened from the dream of life as we ordinarily take it to be and discovered who we truly are. This idea was not something new. There was already in the whole complex of Hinduism the idea of buddhas, of awakened people. Curiously, they are ranked higher than gods. According to the Hindus, even the gods or the angels—the devas—are still bound on the wheel of life, are still trapped within the rat race pursuit of success, pleasure,
