..续本文上一页" because if he said that, he wouldn”t understand the first thing about it.

　　So it is Zen that, if I may put it metaphorically, *Jon-Jo said "the perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep." And another poem says of wild geese flying over a lake, "The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection, and the water has no mind to retain their image." In other words this is to be--to put it very strictly into our modern idiom--this is to live without hang-ups, the word "hang- up" being an almost exact translation of the Japanese _bono_ and the Sanskrit _klesa_, ordinarily translated "worldly attachment," though that sounds a little bit--you know what I mean--it sounds pious, and in Zen, things that sound pious are said to stink of Zen, but to have no hang-ups, that is to say, to be able to drift like a cloud and flow like water, seeing that all life is a magnificent illusion, a plane of energy, and that there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. Fundamentally. You will be afraid on the surface. You will be afraid of putting your hand in the fire. You will be afraid of getting sick, etc. But you will not be afraid of fear. Fear will pass over your mind like a black cloud will be reflected in the mirror. But of course, the mirror isn”t quite the right illustration; space would be better. Like a black cloud flows through space without leaving any track. Like the stars don”t leave trails behind them. And so that fundamental--it is called "the void" in Buddhism; it doesn”t mean "void" in the sense that it”s void in the ordinary sense of emptiness. It means void in that is the most real thing there is, but nobody can conceive it. It”s rather the same situation that you get between the speaker, in a radio and all the various sounds which it produces. On the speaker you hear human voices, you hear every kind of musical instrument, honking of horns, the sounds of traffic, the explosions of guns, and yet all that tremendous variety of sounds are the vibrations of one diaphragm, but it never says so. The announcer doens”t come on first thing in the morning and say "Ladies and gentlemen, all the sounds that you will hear subsequentally during the day will be the vibration of this diaphragm; don”t take them for real." And the radio never mentions its own construction, you see

　　 And in exactly the same way, you are never able, really, to examine, to make an object of your own mind, just as you can”t look directly into your own eyes or bite your own teeth, because you ARE that, and if you try to find it, and make it something to possess, why that”s a great lack of confidence. That shows that you don”t really know your "it". And if you”re "it," you don”t need to make anything of it. There”s nothing to look for. But the test is, are you still looking

　　 Do you know that

　　 I mean, not as kind of knowledge you possess, not something you”ve learned in school like you”ve got a degree, and "you know, I”ve mastered the contents of these books and remembered it." In this knowledge, there”s nothing to be remembered; nothing to be formulated. You know it best when you say "I don”t know it." Because that means, "I”m not holding on to it, I”m not trying to cling to it" in the form of a concept, because there”s absolutely no necessity to do so. That would be, in Zen language, putting legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch, or as we would say, gilding the lily.

　　Now you say, "Well, that sounds pretty easy. You mean to say all we have to do is relax

　　 We don”t have to go around chasing anything anymore

　　 We abandon religion, we abandon meditations, we abandon this, that, and the other, and just live it up anyhow

　　 Just go on." You know, like a father says to his child who keeps asking "Why

　　 Why, Why,…

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