Although, as with so many other things, I have left my life as an art historian behind, it struck me that much of what I have taken to be the principal concepts underlying basic Buddhism, and which I talked about last year, should not, as frequently tends to be the case, be isolated in some separate philosophical or religious compartment of our minds.

The unity of all that is and is not has striking relevance to the works of art, to the paintings and sculptures, which are some of the greatest achievements of the human spirit, giving physical existence to, and uniting at one stroke, the real and the unreal, the natural and the artificial, the representation and the represented; turning three or more dimensions into two and making the concrete and the abstract one.

It gives, in many cases, a special meaning to the element of illusion that is omnipresent in our relation to, and perception of, the world in which we live.

Indeed, Emptiness is that often disquieting concept when one hears of it for the first time, which declares that, powerful as the illusion is in the case of human beings, no one and nothing has a permanent, unchanging, unitary self or single origin, and owes its existence to that process of interdependent origination, which is so very clear in the genesis of many finished works of art.

The very mention of the word illusion is, however, a reminder of how very rare in the whole history of art worldwide are any virtually impenetrable, full-blooded attempts to create an illusion of three-dimensional realty on a two dimensional surface.

Most frequently, in the West, such things take the form of friezes of Putti or of other figures, painted in seemingly quite low relief in tones of brown or grey, high on the walls of churches or of great Palladian-style Villas to prevent the illusion of three-dimensionality from being broken.

Indeed, some of the most striking architectural portrayals of perspectival space immediately reflect the essential paradox involved in forcing three dimension into two.

Within the vast, romantic interiors of Piranesi' s eighteenth century Carceri or Prisons, innumerable stairs lead nowhere, climbing up into and out of the impenetrable surfaces of blank stone walls, while in M.C. Escher’s comparable, twentieth century prints, the paradox of absolute reality and total unreality is carried, with sharply defined precision, a stage further.

In his Another World (Other World) on the left, it is impossible to tell which architectural structures are horizontal, which are vertical, what is up and what is down, since everything is upside down and downside up.

Then, his Waterfall, on the right, shows a seemingly simple, thoroughly three-dimensional and seemingly realistic structure until you realise that after cascading down two stories to drive the waterwheel, the stream, as its retaining walls quite clearly show, continues to flow steadily downwards until it once more, paradoxically, reaches the top in order to plunge down once more.

Moreover, if you follow its zigzagging course with care, you find that all the sets of architectural pillars and columns are very far from being directly underneath the forms which they seemingly support, since you invariably have to travel along two arms of a right-angle to get from the lower structure to the one which is seemingly directly above it.

Another, witty reference to quite a different aspect of the contradiction between a thoroughgoing pictorial illusion of some particular scene or object and what we normally care to think of as reality, is encapsulated in the seemingly completely realistic, twentieth century painting by the Surrealist painter, René Magritte, entitled Ceci n'est pas une Pipe, which means, translated into English and given added emphasis by the use of bold, that 'This is not a Pipe".

The joke here, the paradox if you like, is that it looks like a pipe, but is actually only a painting of one.

Moving on from the concept of illusion to that of impermanence, this is everywhere expressed in works of art and architecture by their many widely differing rates of alteration and decay, though that is often only realised when faced with ruined relics dug up from the distant past, and is always there in the endless, ultimately losing efforts at preservation or conservation,.

And finally, turning to the three practical aids to the living of one's life, the loss or the giving away of such works of art as one may, in one way or another, have happened to possess, thereby becoming part of one's life, can be a very good test of one's non-attachment.

While the creation of a great deal of the art produced in the West in the last five centuries or so has undoubtedly been motivated, at least in part, by the often enormous sums of money it could attract, or by a desire for fame, a remarkable proportion of it has been made by those who have come very close to the unattainable ideal of doing for the doing, whether in prehistoric caves or in medieval monasteries and temples, or by those who, in doing what they did outside of any religious context, were content, not only with anonymity, but with a meagre living at best or even with a life of abject poverty.

Another interesting Buddhist concept is that of encounter, not only by entering into the works of art themselves and becoming one with them, like any Shingon Buddhist devotee in contemplating the image of a Buddha, but also by thereby coming into closer contact with the minds of the artists who created them.

Deep contemplation or meditation, which is often primarily associated with Zen Buddhism, but is in fact an essential aspect of Buddhist practice in almost all of its innumerable sects, is also fundamental to any attempt to make real contact with a work of art, although this basic fact is frequently forgotten as we wander through art galleries and sculpture parks and glance for a few moments, or occasionally for a minute or two, at work after work after work,

When it comes to paintings in particular, and graphic works in general, there is, throughout their history, running from the earliest cave paintings of forty or fifty thousand years ago to the present day and on into the future, another kind of constant, which lies in the never-ending battle between space and plane, and in attempts either to harmonise them or else to accentuate the contrast and the paradox of forcing three dimensions into two or, as in the case of mobile sculptures and the like, of creating four dimensions out of three with every passing moment.

In mobiles, such as those by Alexander Calder, the fourth dimension, that of time, is an essential part of the design. With every slightest movement, every breath of air, the placement, the apparent shape and the relationships between the various colours are transformed.

Even when actual movement is impossible, as in Hokusai's print, the fourth dimension is implicit. There, the boat is seen at the very moment that it plunges into the body of the Great Wave, which is caught in the act of breaking into claws of foam, far overhead.

In Rembrandt's early works, such as his Abraham's Sacrifice of Isaac of 1635, his efforts to portray, or if you like, imply movement, are often taken to extremes. There, as the angel plunges down to grasp the wrist of Abraham, the knife that has just fallen from his hand is still seen in mid-air before it clatters to the ground. But Rembrandt was no nineteenth century Impressionist; there is no blurring of the knife and its sharp cutting edge, and certainly to me, the outcome verges on the comical.

But by 1661, when he painted his Group Portrait of The Syndics, the Board of the Clothmakers Guild in Amsterdam, where the implication of movement and the passage of time is subtle in the extreme, the fundamental paradox inherent in the battle between space and plane, and the control of the element of illusion, are taken to new lengths.

There, the figure second from the left is caught in the act of rising at some interjection from the floor of the meeting, while that on the extreme right is still in the process of putting his gloves down on the table.

The intensity of Rembrandt's determination to keep the intrusion of the three-dimensional world from destroying the two-dimensional surface structure of the painting, is such that I wonder how many of you here tonight were immediately aware, as the painting flashed up on the screen, of the actual content of the scene that you were looking at, or could describe it fully even now.

It may well come as a surprise to see, as is shown in the Diagram of a very approximate ground plan, that what is represented is actually a rectangular table with two figures seated on the left, receding side, and two more on the right, while the Chairman, gesturing with his right hand at the contents of the open ledger, is seated at the centre of the far end, with the attendant just behind and to his right as we see it, the black dot indicating the apparent position of the viewer, extremely close up.

Six main elements are used to control the actual space involved in the painting without, however, completely destroying it.

The first of these is the back wall of the room, which though almost, but not exactly, parallel to the picture plane, is a clearly three-dimensional structure.

On the other hand, the extreme foreshortening of the visible, left side of the table greatly limits its apparent depth, as does the carefully selected, low viewpoint, which not only establishes that the viewer is situated at a lower level than that of the dais on which the Syndics are seated, but also leads to the complete invisibility of the table's receding upper surface.

The sixth, and most important factor of all is the subtle placement of the figures at the table, their heads seemingly almost parallel to the picture plane, which also has the purpose and advantage of allowing all of the portraits of his principal clients to be painted with the same degree of definition.

But Rembrandt, who was clearly unconcerned with presenting the spectator with a straightforward illusion of a three-dimensional space, was also in no sense a slave to the by then well-known laws of perspectival recession.

On the one hand, the Artificial Perspective of the Renaissance rules that if two sides of any cubic object can be seen, the forward side must be drawn parallel to the picture plane, with the other receding to a vanishing point in the distance. In any bifocal system, on the other hand, both sides will be shown to be receding, neither of them lying parallel to the picture plane.

But Rembrandt, for good reason, has broken all the rules.

The forward edge of the table, which any accurate perspectival scheme demands, should either be set parallel to the plane surface, allowing the natural foreshortening of the picture as a whole to introduce an element of recession when viewed, as is the case here, from slightly to the left of centre, or sloping downwards to the open-ended right-hand side, has actually been shown as sloping slightly upwards.

In visual terms the reason is quite simple.

This subtle breaking of the rules means that, instead of sliding off towards, and out beyond, the open-sided right, the eye is gently held in by the leftward slope and, in conjunction with the two right-hand Syndics, guided back towards the central figure of the chairman, already accentuated as he is by the change of lighting demarcating the forward corner of the table.

It also has the effect of reducing the angle between the upper surfaces of the two sides of the table almost to a straight line, thereby further lessening the conflict between space and plane.

This great painting is, in short, a powerful statement of the need for meditation, quiet contemplation, if there is to be any hope of coming to terms with, and actually encountering a work of art, much less the mental processes that brought it into being.

What is true of Rembrandt and his paintings is no less true of a multitude of other artists who could all too easily be imprisoned in quite separate compartments of one's mind.

Prime embodiments of the unity of all that is at a fundamental level are particularly clear in many of the paintings by Cezanne, which seem at first sight to be infinitely far removed from Rembrandt's paintings of a full two centuries earlier.

In one of the major examples from the long series depicting the Montagne Ste. Victoire, one of his favourite motifs, the seemingly partly intuitive, partly conscious effort to harmonise a depiction of deep space with an emphasis on the pictorial plane, is very clear.

In the many earlier attempts over the centuries to create a realistic sense of three-dimensional space, the tendency had usually been to hide, as far as that was possible, the actual brushwork involved in the creation of a painting in order not to interfere with an illusion of three-dimensionality, however partial that might be.

Now, when every brushstroke is left clearly visible, each detail of the working process can in principle be seen.

On the lower right-hand side, a series of diagonals creates the sense of an almost aerial view out over a flat landscape, reaching far into the distance from the seemingly raised foreground to the distant mountain, and only modified on the extreme right by the actual nature of the brushwork and the near horizontal of an inward sloping viaduct in the middle distance.

On the left, the verticals of the foreground tree and of the woods and houses to its immediate right, together with the non-spatial organisation of the brushwork to its left and the discontinuity of the mountain slope to either side, disguised by the somewhat uncertain brushwork of the foreground branches, serve to maintain the integrity of the pictorial surface.

When it comes to the mountain itself, with the pine branches, which curl in from left and right above it, following its contours, Cezanne suddenly, at the last moment, apparently realised that he was in big trouble, having made a serious mistake which thoroughly disturbed the intended relationship between deep landscape space and the pictorial surface.

It takes a keen eye to note at first glance that the branch immediately to the right of the summit once hung down across the sloping contour of the mountain, its truncated tip still visible against the mountainside, and had the effect of pinning the nearest foreground to the furthest distance.

Immediately, he broke the continuity of the overlapping frond by overlaying it with broad, sky-coloured strokes of white and beige that carry on down to the right above the upper contour of the mountainside and in doing so cut slightly into it at times because they constitute the final, uppermost layer of the painted surface.

Another painting, this time of a simple-seeming line of trees, entitled Tall Trees at the Jas de Bouffan, also exhibited in the Courtauld Institute Gallery, again reveals the same unhesitatingly bold reaction when confronted at a late stage by an unsolved problem in the relationship between three-dimensionality and the actual plane surface.

In this particular case he realised that in the tree in the foreground on the right, he had upset the pictorial balance which he sought by giving undue structural solidity to the fork a third of the way up the trunk.

He then made no attempt to fiddle with any partial repainting of the offending section of the tree, but simply, at the last moment, painted a stroke of bold sky-white on top of it.

In a similar way, when he realised that the second tree from the left was irrevocably lying too far into the pictorial space, he simply plugged the deep hole in the foliage halfway up by broadening its curving form and giving it exactly the same width and colouration as the foreground tree immediately to its left; and this despite the fact that in so doing, as any pedant would observe, the linkage with its slimmer, darker trunk hidden behind a curtain of bright foliage immediately below, was almost completely broken.

Nor was this attitude transformed in any fundamental way when it came to the apparently very different matter of portrait painting.

In his painting of A Man with a Pipe, both his economy of means and his concern for the integrity of the pictorial surface are witnessed by the fact that all the lightest areas of paint, both in the background, as well as in his coat and waistcoat in the foreground and in the highlight in his hat are achieved by simply leaving the light, thin undercoating of the canvas quite untouched and fully visible.

His concern with the maintenance of the plane is also witnessed by the rather unusually blurred, light brush-strokes on the right shoulder of the collar of the waistcoat, which serve to reduce the sense of solidity and recession at that point.

Much more striking, and much more typical, is the fact that when the painting was virtually complete and he realised that the hat was now too three-dimensional, too columnar, in comparison with the rest of the figure, all that he did was lay a series of thick, thumbnail sized, non-structural, completely flat and un-foreshortened strokes of pigment over its left-hand, outer contour in order to reduce the sense of its recession into space and so restore the overall balance of the painting

Just as the brushstrokes visible in Cezanne's paintings let one see the struggles involved in what so often seems to be the effortless creation of a masterpiece, they also allow the following of the actual sequences in which each layer of pigment was laid down.

The same is true in innumerable twentieth century works, and can be seen in perhaps its most extreme form in works such as Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles, in which every splash and dab of pigment can, in principle, be sequenced, and the particular colours lying at each level followed, as succeeding gestures carry them across the canvas laid out on the floor.

To take just one example, it easy to see the way in which the large, lightish yellow blobs of paint, which are visible at the bottom right-hand edge can be followed, unchanged in colour or liquidity right across the painting in two major streams lying above the darker yellow pigment in the layer below.

The entire process of production; how one choice of colour or of pigment density and distribution, how one means of application led on to the next, can actually, if so desired, be reconstructed, thereby opening, at least to some extent, a window deep into the artist's mind and into the mental processes which underlie the physical activities and skills involved in the creation of such paintings.

The underlying unity of all that is and is not, which seems to me to be so clearly given substance in the seemingly so very different works of painters such as Rembrandt and Cezanne can even be embodied in a very special way both in the creation and in the final form of certain individual sculptures such as some of those produced by relatively modern artists such as Henry Moore or Eduardo Paolozzi.

In sculptures such as Michelangelo's early Pietá of 1498-1500 in St. Peter's Rome, the marble of the completed work has been so radically transformed that any connection with the mountains of Carrara and the quarries out of which it has been cut requires a great deal of detective work unless specific documentary evidence still survives.

It is only in the unfinished works, such as the Slave intended for the tomb of his papal patron, Julius II, that the actual, rough-hewn stone from which the figures are emerging and the marks left by the varied sequences of chisels being used in their creation are still visible.

For anybody with such things in mind, on the other hand, the unity of all that is finds a clear analogy not only in the finished bronze of Henry Moore's Three Piece Sculpture: Vertebrae of c. 1968, of which I show you the small-scale plaster model or maquette on the left, but also in the varied processes of its creation.

The ungainly, seemingly unconnected concatenation of different, roughly nailed-together bits of wood on the right is actually the first stage in the making of one part of the armature or underlying structure of the full-scale bronze.

The partial application of a spiders' web of coarse material soaked, and in some places daubed, with plaster follows and is then succeeded in its turn by the full-scale plasters of the various parts, on one of which two of the sculptor's assistants are seen working.

Next, Henry Moore is shown with Hermann Noack beside the enormous metal casting of the whole work in his foundry in Berlin, which precedes the polishing and lacquering that works a total transformation of the final sculpture and creates a sheen of golden bronze.

Similarly varied processes underlie the creation of the Two Piece Reclining Figure No 2 of 1960 in which the workings of interdependent origination still remain so clearly visible.

Echoes of anatomy in an almost tree trunk-like neck; in shoulders and in crudely cut-off arms, are combined with reminiscences of caves and natural arches carved out over the millennia in sheer black outcrops rising from the sea.

Here, in the cliff-like forms of the lower legs, the additive laying on, during the previous stage, of blobs of plaster at the bottom, typical of the building up of forms in clay, are accompanied by the chiselling into the subsequently dried plaster of innumerable, bold, striations reminiscent of the horizontal, weathered strata of rocks, rising layer on layer out of the ocean.

The final work is cast in bronze, but wood, coarse fabric, plaster worked when it was moist or chisel-cut when it was fully dry, are all a part of its creation, showing the results of interdependent origination coming together in the sculptor's mind and, at the same time, forming a particular, physical embodiment of the unity of all that is and is not within a single work of art.

The complimentary processes of building up and cutting back, of which I have been speaking, can be seen in every detail of the surface of the final bronze casting.

In viewing such a work one has to emulate the sculpture itself and be, in one's imagination, continuously changing one's own scale and one's location, from a tiny figure in a rowing boat beneath the towering cliffs of rock to a normal human figure, standing on a green lawn, moving round and looking down at a bronze sculpture .

Such imaginative acts become much easier when the ground is actually flooded, as it was when this particular photograph at Perry Green was taken, or when, as in the case of the vast Reclining Figure in New York, the work is permanently set in water.

To turn from Henry Moore to Eduardo Paolozzi's bronzes of Human Figures is, perhaps, to see both interdependent origination and the unity of all that is and is not in an even stranger form, despite their often being given the highly evocative names of mythological heroes or Christian martyrs, such as Jason on the left or St. Sebastian on the right.

They are indeed, almost alarmingly, both human and not human.

Built up from the debris of man's mechanical creations; from broken springs and cogwheels and the lids of tins, to cast-off bits and pieces of machinery, they are reminders that the natural world is everywhere and not just something out there in the countryside.

Especially when seen in the context of the cosmos, or viewed from outer space, this very Temple, and the towns and cities that we build, and all the multifarious artefacts of every kind that we create, are, just like any ants' nest, simply parts of natural nature.

No wonder Shakyamuni Buddha, unlike us, saw no distinctions between natural and artificial, self and not self.

Now, coming to the end of such a talk as this, I shall once more finish with a poem which, however inadequate it may be, goes like this:-

Remember
that what I say

or have said
or could ever
say

are nothing
but words,
words,

endless words.

But paintings
and sculptures

inhabit a silent,
wordless world
and if anything
I
or anyone else

has said
or written

lingers in the mind
when you kneel down
or sit
in a Zen garden

or look
at a painting
or sculpture
from this
or from any age,

you

will not ever have

a deep
encounter,

never even

come close.