I have made a great many mistakes in my life and I rather think that the latest of them is giving this talk on Paradox, the strict definition of which in the Concise Oxford Dictionary is “A seemingly absurd though perhaps really well-founded statement. A self-contradictory, essentially absurd statement. A person, thing, conflicting with preconceived notions of what is reasonable or possible.”

This is partly because almost all the talks that over the years I have given here in Shogyoji have actually been about paradox in one form or another and repeating oneself is a bad habit and one that is hard to break.

Yet, paradoxically, it is also an apt illustration of the fact that our need to cope with our lives, and survive, has resulted in a biological and psychological make-up that depends on our making distinctions, on separating this from that; in compartmentalising our knowledge in total contradiction of the Buddhist insistence on the absolute unity of all that is, of which, yet again, I have spoken before.

And so, in order to prepare you for the worst, I have written an introductory poem to tell you that:-

This is a talk
of things for which
there are no words,

of koans,
of contradictions in terms,

of waves
that march forever
in seas
that have no water,

of thoughts
about leaving behind
all thought,

of being
and not being,
the self
that is not self,

illusion

perceiving illusion,

of turning one's back
to find the one path
that has no beginning
and no end,

enlightenment.

Whatever enlightenment may be, it surely depends, at the start, on absolute non-attachment and involves transcending the duality of self and not self and all that flows from it.

But the concept of absolute unity contains within itself that of emptiness in the Buddhist sense of the term.

The two of them are inseparable and it makes no difference which is the starting point.

The one entails the other, and it may well be that far deeper than thought or words, a vivid, intuitive, total loss of the self in that absolute unity lies at the heart of what we are groping for when we speak of enlightenment.

Because, when we try to communicate with each other, we are largely forced to fall back on words, we must be extremely careful which words we use and how we use them.

For instance, if a Buddhist were to speak of reality in relation to enlightenment, the question of what was meant by the term would immediately arise, and the answer would have to be emptiness or absolute unity.

To speak of reality in this context is simply to complicate or confuse the issue.

To speak of the attainment of nothingness in relation to enlightenment also seems to me to be a mistake, since nothing is one pole of a duality and only exists in relation to something, which in this case is the personal self which has, by definition, been transcended and merged with the whole.

As is certainly true of Buddhism, there are, of course, fundamental paradoxes at the heart of all religions, or at least of such major religions as Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

In none of them is the nature of the God or gods, who are worshipped with total belief, directly known, and in the case of Christianity, St. Thomas Aquinas, the most famous, as well as the most logical of all catholic theologians, states at the end of his proofs of the existence of God that a leap of faith is still required.

In the case of Buddhism and of Christianity alike, it is easy to forget that all the actions and sayings of Shakyamuni Buddha and of Christ only come down to us at second or third hand or through the written codification of centuries of oral tradition.

The sutras, which lie at the heart of Buddhism, were written hundreds of years later by Indian priests or followers in the religion which, with many variations, grew up after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha.

The Mahāyāna sutras are, indeed, in many cases, as much Hindu as they are Buddhist, and the philosophical core of Buddhism clearly seems to be developed from the Hindu concept of Brahma as the absolute, uncreated, self-existent, eternal essence of the universe from which all things emanate and to which all things return.

Sukhāvatī, the mystical Land of Bliss, the Buddha world of the Pure Land in the sutras, seems to derive from the same source and is to a great extent described in the thoroughly materialistic terms of palaces and treasures, of gem trees “beautiful and brilliant with the seven gems, viz. gold, silver, beryl, crystal, red pearls, diamonds, and corals as the seventh”. It is redolent of the world of the Indian Princes or Maharajas of the time.

What is true of the most descriptive and, therefore in terms of language the most flowery of the sutras is also true of the most austere.

In Buddhism, doing for the doing, without thought of gain or reward of any kind, lies at its heart. Indeed, I well remember Taira Sato cheerfully telling the assembled company after the religious ceremony at the start of one of the Ezas at Three Wheels that it would gain no merit from taking part.

But even The Diamond Cutter Sutra, with its abolition, among other things, of any distinction between being and not being, self and not self, and its reiterated declaration that no one is to be called a Bodhisattva, a person preparing to be a Buddha, who has any idea of a quality, of a self, a being, a living being, a person, is full of references to the accumulation of vast stocks of merit which, paradoxically, are also said not to exist and to be a no-stock of merit.

Nevertheless, the immeasurable merit that could be gained by "a son or daughter of a good family" --- itself a term redolent of the Indian society of the time when the sutra was written --- by sacrificing their lives again and again day and night through aeons of time, or by filling “this sphere of a million millions of worlds with the seven treasures” and giving them to “the holy and enlightened Tathagatas”, would be as nothing to the merit to be gained by –“taking from this treatise of the Law one Gatha of four lines only” and fully teaching it and explaining it to others.

But this, of course, as you might somewhat wearily expect from the title of this talk, leads on to another major paradox, for in this same sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha is reported as saying repeatedly that this very treatise of the Law is both “incomprehensible and inexpressible.”

Indeed, in Section XXVI of The Diamond Cutter Sutra, a Gatha preached by the Buddha says:

A Buddha is to be known from the Law;
for the Buddhas have the Law-body;

And the nature of the Law cannot be understood,
nor can it be made to be understood.

Here again, this is not a paradox confined, beneath all the outward panoply of ceremonial and religious organisation, to the mystical heart of Buddhism.

The outward show of Western Christianity, which, in its Catholic embodiment is both at its most spectacular in terms of ritual and most rigorous in the prescription of infallible dogmas and precise definitions of the nature of God and of the soul, and the like, might seem to be a world away from Buddhism, in which the concepts of a creator God and of the soul do not exist.

Yet even in Catholic Christianity, there runs a mystical current that the ecclesiastical authorities have often found it hard to accommodate and which is virtually indistinguishable from that which runs as a major theme throughout the reported sayings of Shakyamuni Buddha.

When I read, in The Diamond Cutter Sutra, the references to the Law, the ultimate, incomprehensible, inexpressible truth, the Dharmakāya embodiment of the Buddha, I cannot help thinking on the one hand of the opening lines of The Gospel of St. John.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, and on the other of The Cloud of Unknowing, the work of an anonymous fourteenth century English contemplative, who seems to have been a priest and Carthusian monk.

For him, in order to experience a direct, ecstatic experience of the Godhead, you must enter the cloud of unknowing above you, which lies between you and God.

To do this “you must do all that you can to forget all of God's creations and their actions” or in other words “you will need to put a cloud of forgetting beneath you, between you and everything that was ever created… all they do and all their attributes”.

He goes on to say “But now you ask me, ‘How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?’ And to this I can only answer, ‘I do not know’... of God himself no one can think. And so I wish to give up everything that I can think”; this, naturally, in addition to giving up all the sensory inputs of the self.

If the Law were substituted for God in passages such as these, they would hardly look out of place in the Diamond Cutter Sutra.

Placed in this context, the koan, with its contradictions in terms and its impenetrable answers, seems far less strange, for it is simply, in Zen Buddhism, a systematic way of training the novice to move out beyond all discursive thought and intellectual reasoning.

To answer that the sound of one hand clapping is half the sound of two hands clapping will simply not do!

But paradox is not confined to the realms of Buddhist philosophy and the discipline of the koan. It is everywhere in our everyday lives, and I think that it is important that we should come to terms with it and understand its implications.

Agnostics like myself, and a host of others who have no belief in an afterlife, no families to leave behind, and no interest in fame, may nonetheless put inordinate effort into doing things that will only bear fruit long after they are dead. That is paradoxical indeed.

And if you said, “Ah, but that is just doing for the doing”, you may have forgotten the paradox that is hiding there.

In actual fact, we can never do for the doing in any absolute sense. We can only try, as best we can.

There is always a framework within which we act, some hidden or indirect motive within us or outside us, however much we seem to succeed in escaping from its influence.

It is paradoxical also that modern science appears to confirm the existence of the basic discontinuities which underlie the seemingly continuous consciousness, or self, which we construct; the fictitious narrative through which we try to make some sense of what we actually are.

Today, we who condemn the starting of an unjustified, pre-emptive war in Iraq, and suffer its consequences, must remember the paradox that, for the most part, throughout human history, it has not been through discussion and democratic persuasion, but through force, through war, invasion and conquest, that the rule of law has been extended.

It is paradoxical indeed that in an uncertain world in which all the old, comfortable certainties about objective facts have given way to relativity and the uncertainties inherent in the laws of probability, and in which both the necessity for, and the limitations of, rational, scientific enquiry are evident, it is only through reason and decisive action that we, as individuals or societies, can survive.

And finally for tonight, one other fundamental paradox is the knowledge that, for all the advances of modern science, and however much a scientist or medical doctor can tell us of how we function, and however well we understand what they say, we have no sensory awareness of the workings of our brains, which remain, as far as we ourselves are concerned, a total mystery.

This, indeed, is the subject of what you may think is a rather odd love poem I wrote some time ago:-

I am now,
as I always was,
as I will be,
until I no longer exist

an ignorant man.

The constellations
of my thoughts

whirl

in an infinite
infinitesimal space,

in an instant
come into being

out of the void,
in an instant,
are gone.

If I
control them,
or if they control me,

how can I tell?

The whole of my being,

to me,

is a black hole
from which no light
can ever escape.

Other people can say
how I move this pen,
how I write these words,
the muscles that come into play,
the neurons that fire
in what are to me,

as I am,

the unknowable
interconnections
of my mind.

But if I,
as I do it,
can never know,

for myself,

how I lift my finger
or put one foot
in front of the other
to walk down the street,

how much less
can I tell
how it is
that I have loved you,
and that you
have loved me,

all these years.

Indeed like each and every one of you, I myself, whatever that may mean, am a walking, breathing paradox which I once encapsulated in a question, a free haiku, that Taira translated into Japanese for The Breath in the Flute:-

What is
this strange
thing
in which I live,

this me
which is
unknown
to me?