But if you cannot run away from your feet, you cannot run after them either. If it is impossible to escape from reality, from what is now, it is equally impossible to accept or embrace it. You cannot kiss your own lips. Speaking logically, the idea of accepting one’s experience in its totality means nothing. For “yes” has meaning only in relation to “no,” so that if I say “yes” to everything the word ceases to have any content. To abolish all valleys is to get rid of all mountains. By the same logic, it is equally meaningless to say “All is Brahman,” for statements which are applied to all experiences whatsoever add nothing to our knowledge. When I have said that this whole universe is life, reality, Tao, or Brahman, I have said no more than that everything is everything!
It is easy, then, to sympathize with the reviewer of this book who said, “The mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse.” Yet he was mistaken in one slight respect. There was no mouse. And in this tremendous trifle lies the real significance of the book—the meaning which was hidden between the lines because it could not be stated in the words. For between the lines is the paper, the seeming emptiness or nothing, on which the words are printed and which is quite essential to their being printed at all. In a rather similar way, Reality or Brahman is the essential basis of every thing and experience. If I say that paper underlies every word on this page, I might perhaps be understood as saying something like this:
which is neither sensible nor true.
Just as the words cannot “utter” the paper beneath them, because the paper is not another word, so logic cannot express Reality. In logic, words mean nothing if they do not describe particular experiences. But just as the paper is not a word, Reality or Brahman is not a particular experience. The statement “All is Brahman” is indeed nonsense if “Brahman” is held, like most other words, to denote a special experience. Yet if Brahman is nothing that we can experience, why trouble to talk about it at all? Am I not saying a great many words about something of which I know nothing?
Here is the whole point of the nonexistent mouse over which the mountain labored. I do not know Brahman just as I do not see sight. If I am Reality, I cannot grasp it. The life, the Tao, which is the experience of this and all moments I can neither escape nor accept. Every attempt to escape from life or to accept life is as much a vicious circle, as plain an absurdity as trying to know knowledge, to feel feeling, or to burn fire.
It is only when you seek it that you lose it.
You cannot take hold of it, nor can you get rid of it;
While you can do neither, it goes on its own way.
You remain silent and it speaks; you speak and it is silent.
So what?
So that is what millions of human beings make themselves perfectly miserable trying to do. The laboring of the mountain is the fantastic effort of man to grasp the mystery of life, to find God, to attain happiness, to lay hold on absolute, eternal Being. He clutches at his own hand. He seeks what he has never lost. He suffocates from holding his breath.
This absurdity is only possible on the basis of the feeling that “I” am one thing and “life” or “reality” another, that the knower is separate from his knowledge, the known. This book suggests a total acceptance of experience by way of what is called in Buddhism upaya—a device for bringing about an awakening. The hope is that in trying to accept life totally one will discover, not in theory alone but in fact, that “whosoever would save his life shall lose it,” because one is attempting the impossible task of self-love. The psyche of the average man is in a perfect knot of tension through trying to lay a firm, permanent hold on the life which is its own essence. The attempt to “accept” life tightens this knot to the point where the very impossibility of the task reveals its absurdity.
When this is realized in fact, and, I repeat, not in theory alone, there comes into being that state of liberation or release from self-tension which is the meaning of moksha and nirvana, and Tao—the creative power of life—flows forth freely, no longer blocked by the attempt to turn it back on itself.
Written so long after the book itself, this is perhaps more of an epilogue than a preface, and the reader may do well to refer to it again after what follows it in the space of pages but precedes it in the course of time.
Alan W. Watts
The American Academy of Asian Studies
San Francisco, 1952
PREFACE TO LAYMEN AND SPECIALISTS
Books on happiness are generally speaking of two kinds. There are those which tell us how to become happy by changing our circumstances, and those which tell us how to become happy by changing ourselves. And then, if such books are not mere philosophy, both kinds proceed to give practical advice as to the ways and means in which happiness may be attained, describing a spiritual, psychological, or material technique to achieve the desired result.
This book falls into neither of these two categories, its author believing that happiness of the profoundest kind is beyond the reach of any technique under the sun. Although he claims that this book is strictly practical, it does not name a single thing which one can do in order to become happy. Naturally it will be asked, “If there is nothing that one can do either to oneself or to one’s circumstances in order to become happy, is any purpose to be served in writing a book to state such a dismal conclusion?” But the conclusion is not dismal. To put it bluntly, it is possible in a certain sense to become happy without doing anything about it. We do not go quite so far as to say that, without knowing it, man is already more happy than he has ever dreamed. Obviously, this is not true, although it is very nearly true. For the object of this book is to prove to men and women something about themselves as they are now, which, if understood, at once creates the greatest happiness that man can know. By this is not meant a state of mere emotional and mental comfort or gaiety, but rather an inward experience of the spirit which persists through the deepest suffering.
As this book is written primarily for laymen, the author hopes he will be forgiven for calling rather frequently on two departments of knowledge which are usually the special preserve of the learned, namely the philosophy of ancient Asia and certain aspects of modern psychology. He has therefore had to employ a number of special terms because the English language is not always equipped to express certain ideas in plain, straightforward words without lamentable confusion and misunderstanding. He trusts, therefore, that such terms are sufficiently explained, but asks it to be borne in mind that every human being speaks a different language and that sometimes it seems as if words were made to conceal thoughts. Now it is often that the specialist, the professional philosopher or psychologist, delights in the precise use of words, and sometimes he will find this book extremely irritating because it uses words whose meaning is quite clear to the “man in the street” but utterly obscure to the philosopher. For example we may take such words as “life,” “nature,” “love,” “fate,” or “soul.” These words have been used freely because they are living words, which, if read without hypercritical sophistry, can mean more than any number of special terms. Thus it will be seen that the author has tried to steer a middle course between the two obscurities of oversimplicity and overtechnicality.