I have spoken on many occasions of the fact that modern science is moving in the opposite direction to that of the 18th and 19th centuries, which was mainly concerned with classifying and compartmentalising the natural world.

Now tens of thousands of mathematicians and scientists are struggling to evolve a 'theory of everything' in which all the disparate elements are brought together and, in so doing, to create a scientific counterpart of the ancient Buddhist concept of 'the unity of all that is and is not'.'

In their efforts to understand the true nature of the universe, the cosmologists and astrophysicists concerned are, however, at present confronted by the fact that, without inserting a cosmological constant with an assumed value into their equations, together with the twin suppositions that the force of gravity and the distribution of matter, as we observe them from our particular, insignificant position in space, are uniform everywhere, the mathematics and the observations do not match.

Moreover, as regards the assumption of spatial uniformity, scientists are already being given food for thought by the recent discovery of vast voids in the observable universe, and even that of a so-called 'supervoid', some 1.8 billion light years across, each light year covering 9.5 trillion kilometres or so.

It is only a minor paradox that up and down, of which we are so acutely aware in our everyday lives, do not exist in the universe at large, being purely human concepts derived from our relationship to the globe on which we live.

A much more formidable and far-reaching one is that of time.

Einstein, assuming that it did exist, saw it only as a relative, constantly fluctuating entity dependent on the positions and relative motions of the observer and the observed, while Nāgārjuna, the first patriarch of Jōdo Shinshū, active around the 1st or 2nd century AD, believed it to have no objective existence at all.

Whether or not Nāgārjuna's belief, like the intuitions of many very much earlier Buddhists, turns out to be a remarkable prefiguration of modern scientific thought, all such things only show how far we still are from understanding the true nature of the universe in which we live.

This is quite apart from the fact that we ourselves, being made of the very material which we are nonetheless attempting to study objectively, will never be able know why it all came to be in the first place or, if it indeed exists, what the nature of ultimate reality is.

The early Buddhists had similar problems in a somewhat different form.

For them the questions of the origin of the universe, and of why it came to exist in the first place, were largely irrelevant.

They simply considered it to be uncreated; that it had always existed and, that having no beginning, it could have no end; in short, was merely an eternal fact which precluded any concept that there was, or had ever been, a creator God.

So far so good; but then the trouble begins.

In sutra after sutra, both Shakyamuni Buddha and those who followed him were quite clear that ultimate reality was inconceivable, incomprehensible and inexpressible.

How then could it be discussed?

The sutras are, in effect, an intimation of a text which, by its very nature, would not and could not ever be written and this difficulty led, with seeming inevitability, to the fundamental part which paradox, as a combination of self-contradictory statements or features, plays in every aspect of Buddhist thought.

This probably came more naturally to them than one might expect, since the use of paradox went back at least as far as the Hindu Rig Veda of around the late 2nd or early 1st millennium BC.

"There was neither non-existence nor existence then;"

are the opening words of the splendid, very early Creation Hymn after which, in hymn after hymn, there are paradoxes and paradoxical statements of every kind.

As far as the sutras, which lie at the very heart of Buddhism, are concerned, one major difficulty in any attempt to come to grips with them, at least for the non-specialist, and particularly in translation, lies in the fact that they seem to involve three different Levels of Discourse.

The First or Higher Level is that of the Uncreated.

Since we can only communicate in words, which belong to The Second Level, there is nothing factual that can be entered under this Heading.

What is said about it in the Sutras and elsewhere is therefore entered into Section (b) of The Second Level of Discourse.”

The Second or Lower Level is that of the Created.

This comes in two parts;

It is the level of sentient beings, and that of words, through which thoughts or ideas can be communicated.
 
It is the Level of organisation and logic, and depends on the making of distinctions.
 
It relies on defining the meaning of the words employed and on a consistent use of the categories which they are used to create.
 
It is the Level of Sutras intended to open a path towards the inexpressible First or Higher Level of Discourse, the existence of which is often implied by the careful juxtaposition of particular categories and distinctions.

This is what is said about the First or Higher Level in the Sutras and elsewhere.

It is the Level of the inconceivable and inexpressible, and by definition lies beyond the reach of conceptual thought, of ideas or categories of any kind, and cannot be encapsulated in words.

It is the Level of the Dharma, the eternal law of the cosmos, and of the dharmakāya, the truth body of the Buddha, which is identical with ultimate reality.

It is that of the unity of all that is and is not, in which there are no distinctions of any kind.

The Third Level is that of Mystery and Paradox. This is the level of attempts to use words to escape the confines of the First Two Levels.

The Third Level is that of Mystery and Paradox.

This is the level of attempts to use words to escape the confines of the First Two Levels.

It is the level of faith, which is not amenable to logical proof.

It lies outside the limits of everyday logic and makes use of koans, of contradictions in terms and paradoxical statements and the like.

Statements at this Third Level are, in themselves, not open to effective elucidation and can only be taken or left as they are.

It is the realm of feelings and intuitions that are not readily expressible in words.

It is, nevertheless, the Level in which paradoxes or contradictions in terms, particularly when piled up one after another, can be used in ways that imply the existence of the First or Higher Level.

I should, however, make it clear that 'Third', in this particular case, does not mean 'Lowest'.

It could very well have been categorised as the First Level, as mystery is central, since time immemorial, to tribal and ethnic religions of every kind and not only plays a major role in Hinduism and Buddhism alike, but is also a vital element in Christianity, despite the latter's seemingly very different basis in many ways.

To give the prime example in Roman Catholicism, as opposed to Protestantism, the Sacrifice of the Mass is centred on the moment of transubstantiation in which the Host, or wafer of unleavened bread, is seen as being transformed, not metaphorically, but actually, into the crucified Saviour,

'Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity.'

It is also easy to forget that until the waning of the Middle Ages, monasticism was the driving force in the spread of Christianity, and to remember that it is at the Level of Mystery, or mysticism, that these three religions come most closely together.

In Catholicism, the enclosed Carthusian Order of monks and nuns is still, as it always was, devoted to a life of prayer and contemplation completely divorced from the outside world.

The anonymous mystic and author of The Cloud of Unknowing, who was probably a 14th century Carthusian contemplative, could very well have just come from sitting and listening at the feet of Shakyamuni Buddha, when he opens Section 6 by saying

"Well now, naturally you may well ask: 'how am I to think of God himself? And what is he?' The only answer I can give is; 'I don't know!'

And the same is true when the heading of Section 9 announces that

"In contemplation thoughts hinder rather than help."

He might just have been talking to St. Paul or to Shinran Shonin, when heading Section 34 with

"God's grace is free, not earned."

The Nirvana Sutra contains a classic example of the use of Third Level Discourse to intimate that, beyond 'the cloud of unknowing', which lies between them, there exists an inexpressible First Level.

It consists of an unbroken, one-and-a-half page sequence of statements, referring to the Adamantine Body of a Tathāgata, of which some forty are, on the face of it, straightforwardly paradoxical and are surrounded by others which are closely related to them. Blum, pp. 91-93.

To give just five examples, it is said of the Adamantine Body that

"It is not and it is."
"It is neither passive nor active."
"It is neither unified nor differentiated."
"A tathāgata saves all living beings and yet does not save anyone."
"When it enters parinirvana, it does not enter parinirvana."

A single paradox shows that neither of its diametrically opposed components are applicable and already implies the existence of a higher, inexpressible reality.

Their mesmerising accumulation, one after another, is designed to demonstrate that there can be no conceivable Second Level concepts that are relevant, and positively rams the point home.

The difficulties inherent in such a procedure are clearly recognised, since at one point, near the start, it is said that the Adamantine Body is "inconceivable and will always be inconceivable"; at another that "it is without words, existing apart from words", and near the end of the list that

"It is not a body and yet it is not a nonbody; there is no way to fully communicate this."

There is, however, one remarkable verse in the Avatamsaka Sutra (Cleary, p. 1153, v. 2) in which the meaning or intention of such paradoxical statements is put beyond doubt in declaring that

"The Buddha is not finite or infinite: The great sage has transcended finitude and infinity."

Reality, and by this I mean ultimate reality, and not the reality of the world of illusion that we can perceive, is quite simply 'other'.

In the Prajñāpāramitāhṛidaya or Heart Sutra, with its succinct and paradoxical discussion of form and emptiness, this is put in splendidly poetic mode in the final line, referring to itself:-

"Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, 0 what an awakening, all hail!"

This is often referred to as being enigmatic, though why this is so is difficult to see in the light of the opening statement that

"Avalokita, the Holy Lord and Bhodisattva, was moving in the
deep course of the wisdom which has gone beyond."

Indeed, it is a clear evocation of the gulf between the First or Higher Level of Discourse and the Second and Third Levels; of the need to traverse it, and of the joy that is the reward of so doing.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the need to 'go beyond' in order to escape from the bondage of the Second Level, the level of logic and of the words and distinctions and categories that we habitually make, the Level at which we normally tend to operate, more succinctly put than in the Avatamsaka Sutra :-

"-- in all the worlds there only exists verbal expression, and verbal expression has no basis in facts. Furthermore, facts have no basis in words.” Blum, p. 462

One of the more serious consequences of failing to recognise the existence of three distinct Levels of Discourse in Mahāyāna texts in particular, and the distance which lies between the First Level, that of the uncreated, and the Second Level to which all created things and all spoken or written words necessarily belong, can often lead the unsuspecting reader to be confronted by what appear to be blatant self-contradictions.

Early on in The Nirvana Sutra for instance, the Buddha is said to state in verse that

"All created things
 Have nature impermanent.
 After coming into existence, they do not abide.”  Blum, p.48

But then, just over two hundred pages later, he declares

"But a wise person should discern and never say, "Everything is impermanent." Blum, p. 243

In the first instance, the sutra is operating at the normal, Second Level of Discourse because the Buddha is speaking to Cunda, a follower and the son of an artisan, and is therefore using 'skilful means' in order to make what he was saying understandable to an ordinary person.

In the second case, however, his immediate explanation for such an unexpected and seemingly contradictory announcement is given as

"Why? Because the seed of buddha-nature is within one's own body. Blum. p. 243

Statement and explanation, taken both separately and together, make complete sense once it is recognised that the whole passage involves an implicit, unannounced melding of Second and First Level Discourse, since, as is repeatedly argued elsewhere, the unperceived Buddha-nature inherent in the impermanent human body is uncreated and eternal.

In this, and in many other cases, once the Levels of Discourse between which the sutra habitually operates are borne in mind, there is in fact only the appearance, and not the reality, of self-contradiction.

That the accumulation of paradoxical statements referred to earlier is indeed intended to be a means of demonstrating that reality resides at a Higher Level, also seems to be confirmed both by the antecedent example of the Rig Veda and by the subsequent development of Zen Buddhism.

Especially in the Rinzai school, the use of koans or statements for which there is no analytical or conceptual means of elucidation is seen as a major way of helping students, during their training, to move up from the Second Level of Discourse towards the First, and in so doing to achieve a direct, intuitive understanding of the true nature of reality.

One of the most familiar examples, to which I have so often referred, is "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" which did, I am afraid, give rise to yet another attempt at poetry on my part, entitled Avatamsaka Paradox, which goes like this:-

One hand
clapping

is the drumbeat
of reality,

the true sound
of silence,

where there is
no duality,

no drumstick,

no drum.

Other typical koans are "What was your original face, the one you had before your father and mother were born?" or, with the problem implicitly embedded in the briefest of tales, "When a monk asked Joshu 'What is the meaning of the patriarch's coming from the west?', he answered "The oak tree in the front garden.”

But paradox of one kind or another is not confined to koans or the shifting, often esoteric language of the sutras.

Particularly in the wider sense, not simply of verbal self-contradiction, but of 'something that combines contradictory features or qualities', it is inherent in the very fabric of our everyday lives.

As you all well know by now, having started this series of some twenty or so annual talks on a basis of almost total ignorance, I have had to learn as I go along.

And so, when I spoke about it before, and even as recently as two or three years ago when I started to think about giving this present talk, I had little idea of how important and how central an aspect of our existence paradox is.

If one turns, for example, to the subject of evolution, it is something that most people never think of as being paradoxical at all.

It is usually seen quite simply as being the story of the birth and the development of ever more complex forms of life, whereas in fact it is totally dependent on death.

Without death there could be no evolution, only constant repetition and an exponential, explosive rise in population.

It is death alone that makes the chance mutations, which occur from generation to generation in every form of organic life, the engines of change and development, whether for better or for worse, the latter alternative being weeded out by the processes of natural selection, preserving only the fittest and the best adapted to the environment in which they find themselves, and which they subsequently help to shape and even to transform.

As individuals, the less fit die prematurely, while over generational time the less well adapted species fail to survive for one reason or another.

Yet, paradoxically indeed, death is a thing that every biological entity, ourselves included, is programmed to fight off for as long as it possibly can.

At this point I cannot, however, resist referring to the one exception to the general rule in the form of altruism of which I once spoke in the context of prides of lions, and also remarked on how difficult it is for self-aware animals such as ourselves, with extremely complex subconscious and conscious aspects to our brains, to be truly altruistic.

It is remarkable enough to see how common it is among insects like bees and ants, but perhaps the ultimate paradox is to find that it even occurs in unicellular entities such as bacilli and amoebas.

When normally solitary amoebas clump together in times of scarcity in order to move off as a single unified group to improve their chances of finding food, those on the periphery may, if things become desperate, commit suicide in order to help the group as a whole to survive, and some bacteria even kill themselves the moment they are infected by a virus order to stop the disease from spreading.

One voracious, single-celled marine predator, Cafeteria Roenbergensis, which preys on bacilli, even fights back, when attacked by its nemesis, a giant, somewhat cell-like virus, by creating within itself a more normal, smaller virus to kill the invader. This does not save its own life, but when it dies and breaks open it disperses its home-made, protective viruses, rather than copies of its attacker, and so prevents the spread of the infection.

To move on to another, major, evolutionary paradox, it is mass extinctions in each of which anything from 50 to 85% of all existing species were wiped out, not steady developmental processes, that have been the primary source of development and change throughout the history of organic life on earth after the first few billion years of relative stasis.

Without the five mass extinctions of which we now know from the geological record, the human race would very possibly never have come into existence.

The series starts about 440 million years ago at the end of the Ordovician period and culminates some 65 million years ago with that in the late Cretaceous which, together with a vast number of other species, saw the end of the 150 million year reign of the dinosaurs.

Over the last few million years, in the absence of such overwhelming competition, the mammals, although still in the early stages of their evolution, were able to develop and proliferate and eventually become, at least for the time being, the dominant species on this particular planet.

This has led in its turn to further paradoxical situations which we must face up to and try to do something about.

As things now stand, runaway overpopulation is the most serious of all the self-induced problems which face the human race as a result of its reaching the top of the food chain and exterminating most of the major predators which formerly helped to keep it in check.

Yet such is our growing sense of compassion, our very humanity, combined with our innate fear and misunderstanding of death and its evolutionary role, that all of our ever-increasing technical powers and burgeoning medical sciences are devoted to exacerbating the problem in every possible way.

But for recent advances in these fields, I and millions of others like me, and probably many of you in this Buddha hall, would not be around to make our contribution to increasing overpopulation and in the process, at least in the developed world, where birth rates are actually falling as result of affluence and a growing middle class, unbalancing the relative numbers of young and old, with unforeseeable consequences for future social stability.

In all the rest of nature, or at least in those parts of it that we have not already destroyed, a delicate balance is still maintained by death in one form or another.

Whether in the Serengeti or in the Amazon rainforests, the overall health of any non-human ecological system largely depends on a sufficiency of predators and on endless killing to hold their prey in check, and most of the nature programmes on our television sets naturally tend to focus in increasing detail on the dramatic, unending slaughter on which such systems depend.

Given the countless millennia of our evolutionary background, and our own prehistory and history as an out of control predatory and frequently self-destructive species, it comes as no surprise to find that warfare and perpetual murderous violence in ever more imaginative forms are the staple content of a vast proportion of the cartoons and films and video games intended for the amusement of children, teenagers and adults alike.

It is a problem to which, with its many psychological and social ramifications, a great deal more attention should be paid.

And therein lies another paradox.

Religion, which for much, and indeed for a long time most, of the human species, has been seen as enshrining its highest aspirations, and which is clearly one of its most defining aspects, has, throughout recorded history, been a constant source of wars and massacres and individual killings.

Even Buddhism itself has not been wholly exempt from recurrent episodes of violence, and Rennyo Shonin, the great fifteenth century restorer of Jōdo Shinshū, was, as you know, forced to flee from Yoshizaki, leaving behind his newly built and thriving temple.

His temple in Kyoto had previously been burnt to the ground by warrior monks sent down by the Tendai religious leaders on Mount Hiei, one of the great centres of established Buddhist faith, in order to eliminate what was seen as a growing threat to their hegemony.

Leaving aside such things as ongoing wars of religion and the like, a further paradox, which largely goes unnoticed by well-intentioned liberals and those who yearn for peace, is that up to now it has almost always been through force that the rule of law has been established and maintained, and by war and conquest that its sway has subsequently been extended.

It is a further paradox that it is only the willingness to threaten an all-out nuclear holocaust, and stockpile many times the number of nuclear weapons needed to carry out the threat, that has so far held the major powers at bay, while still allowing lesser wars and massacres of every kind to be carried on as usual.

But paradox is not confined to history and to world events.

We carry it within ourselves, each one of us as living organisms.

Because we incorrigibly see ourselves as separate, individual entities and not as the complex ecosystems that we actually are, we tend to see interdependent origination as something external, and ourselves as simply the outcome of it, whereas in fact it is constantly at work, not only outside us, but within us.

Not only does it, through our bacterial biota, serve to keep us alive on the one hand or, on the other, sweep us untimely to our deaths, it also plays an intimate part in the carrying out of every single conscious or unconscious action that we ever perform.

The simple seeming, apparently conscious act of deciding to move my arm and lift a finger to tap out a letter on the computer keyboard is actually the outcome of an unbelievably complex web of interdependent origination and paradox.

As far as my conscious self is concerned, and as the Nirvana Sutra might have said of what I do,

"It is neither deciding nor not deciding."

And that, of course, is because the decision had already been made some milliseconds earlier by the subconscious part of me of which, by definition, I am completely unaware.

Moreover, even after the event, I have no idea how I did it.

Neuroscientists are probably already able to identify the neurones and synapses which went into action to make it happen, and an anatomist could certainly describe all the muscles that had to be used and in what sequence; but of all of that, I, or the conscious part of me, know nothing.

I just do it.

Put in another, slightly different way, we ourselves are simply one particular aspect of the unity of all that is and is not in much the same way as a living Buddha is, at one level, subject as we are to the laws of interdependent origination.

Even here, in the very mention of aspects of basic Buddhist thought, our tendency to compartmentalise raises its ugly head, and the all-embracing role of paradox should not be pushed back into the distant past of the sutras.

It is still fundamental to the Buddhism of today and is not confined to any particular sect, and lives on into the present in such later developments as the Zen Buddhism initiated in 7th century China or that founded by Shinran Shonin in 13th century Japan.

In Chapter 15 of Great Living, in his ground-breaking translation of, and commentary on, the Tannisho, published in 2010, Kemmyo Taira Sato, in a Section entitled On the relationship between being human and being Buddha, states that "it is not one and not two", "neither identity nor duality", which is a paraphrase of the paradox in the Nirvana Sutra quoted above, which, when referring to The Adamantine Body, says that "It is neither unified nor differentiated."

In Buddhism, as in life, paradox constitutes a fundamental aspect of our existence, and given the title of this talk, it is perhaps a kind of mini- or proto-paradox that I have not said much about reality.

This is because there is not very much that can be said about something which is 'inexpressible' and which has always been, and will always remain 'unknowable'.

Early Buddhists simply said that "it cannot be understood, nor can it be made to be understood" and it seems that even some modern scientists, in the light of the ever-growing complexity of modern particle physics, are already being driven, however reluctantly, to the same conclusion.

The Chief Editor of the research journal, Nature Physics, recently ended a piece on particle physics by asking "So what after all is a particle? …Perhaps ultimately we'll have to accept that it's all just maths, and equations are all that can guide us in understanding the workings of matter."

And hat leads on to a final poem which is, I think, not altogether downbeat and goes like this:-

Of reality

I can know
nothing at all.

A dream
that I dream

is all
I can ever be,

a brief moment
of delight.