← Alan Watts Being in the Way
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Teaching meditation is its own skill. You don't need to be a master practitioner to begin learning how to guide others, but you do need real training. Join Buddhist teacher David Nikturn and Professor Robert Thurman for a free online discussion on Tuesday, May 26th at 6:00pm Eastern Time, exploring the role of the teacher in the Buddhist tradition, why lineage and transmission matter, and what it means to skillfully support others in meditation practice. Today they'll also discuss Dharma Moon and Tibet House's Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training program beginning in June 2026. You'll have a chance to ask questions, meet the teaching team, and find out whether the program might be a good fit for you. Visit dharmamoon.comfriend that's dharmamoon.comfriend for more information and to reserve your spot for the free event on Tuesday, May 26th.
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Welcome to Being in the Way. Hello, I'm your host Mark Watts, and this is the Alan Watts Podcast. And today we're going to listen to a really great talk. It was recorded in Ojai, California, and it's called Zen and the Art of the Controlled Accident. And it really dives deeply into my father's aesthetic appreciation of Zen. And to celebrate this, we've also created a new web presence called the Art of Alan Watts, and you can find it linked from the Alan Watts.org website. But you'll be able to experience some of the materials that inspired him and then also contemporary interpretations and posters and all of that. So in this way, we're celebrating my father's appreciation of Zen aesthetics and invite you to join us to look around and see what's going on. And so now for today's podcast, Zen and the Art of the Controlled Accident, recorded in Ojai, California, here's Alan Watts.
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I have entitled this seminar Zen Buddhism and the Art of Controlled Accidents. This is going to involve not only the aesthetic domain of the arts, but also what we might call spontaneity in living. And so I've got to begin by going back to the earliest source of Zen, which is not actually Buddhism, but the Chinese philosophy known as Daoism, the way of the dao that is spelled in English Tao, but by Mandarin speakers pronounced approximately dao. The scholars who transliterated these words had a way of transliterating them so that only if you were in the know and were a scholar could you pronounce them properly. They might just as well have spelled it Dao or D O w. Now, in order to understand Daoism, which originates in China probably later than Confucius, about 400 B.C. although the materials out of which this philosophy was evolved probably go back very much further. The dao is a way of life, and the word dao means the way, approximately the course of nature, the flow of things. And in order to understand this point of view, we have to make a very, very radical adjustment in our ordinary common sense. Not all Chinese people by any means, understand this, but it has, in a way, leaked into the general culture of China over the centuries, so that even, shall we say, the man in the street has some glimmer of what it's about. But it involves one absolutely radical transformation in our ordinary, everyday common sense. And I have to explain this from the beginning, because Zen and Taoism in common involve not a system of doctrine, not a set of beliefs as we ordinarily understand religion. They involve a transformation of your consciousness, that is to say, of the way in which you experience your own existence at every moment. One might say that the average individual, not only in the west but also in the east, has a feeling of himself as separate from other people and from the earth itself, from the space and the stars and everything around the earth. He feels this in such a way that it's expressed in all the phrases of common speech. We talk about coming into the world. I came into this world. As a matter of fact, you didn't. You came out of it just in the same way as an apple comes out of an apple tree. As an expression of the apple tree, we say, I'm facing facts, as if facts, that is to say, the things going on in nature around you were something you confronted as a being alien from, different from those facts and meeting them as if they were total strangers. We talk about the conquest of nature as a phrase expressing man's control over his environment, which is a very hostile phrase. Now, in order to get the Chinese point of view, may I be so simple as to take you back to the old lesson about the bees and the flowers, not to illustrate how sex works, but to illustrate the very fundamental property of nature. There are no flowers where there are no insects. There are no insects where there are no flowers. They go together just in the same way as your head goes with your feet or as the head of a cat goes with the tail of a cat, except in the case of Manx cats that don't have tails. But ordinarily, if you were watching a cat walking and you'd never seen a cat before, and you were looking at it through a narrow crack in a fence, you would see first the head and then the tail. Then the cat would turn around and walk past again and you would see first the head and then the tail. And you might assume that your experience of the head of the cat was one event and the tail was another event, that they would be separate from each other, but they would be related as cause to effect. But if your crack in the fence were widened, you would see it was all one cat and that the head and the tail go together. Now we have a way of attending to life which we call conscious attention. And that is like a narrow crack in a fence. Our speech reflects that you can only think of one thing at a time, and that is our one of our ways of experiencing the world bit by bit. For example, if you want to eat a chicken, you have to cut it up. And so you go to the grocery and you get a cut up fryer, or else you cut it up at the table. Chickens do not come out of eggs as cut up fryers. They come out the entire chicken. And so the world that we live in and we experience is not cut up into things and events. It all goes together in the same way that the bees and the flowers go together. Only we don't notice this. We've got a way of thinking which splits it all up. And as a result of that, we think of ourselves and so feel ourselves as if we were something separate from the whole domain of nature. And to make a long story short, and to tell you the whole point right at the beginning, the the disciplines of Taoism and of Zen proposed to change your consciousness in such a way that you will no longer feel that you are an isolated unit locked up inside a bag of skin, but that you will actually experience the fact that your real self, the real you, is everything that there is but concentrated and expressing itself at the point called your physical organism. There is of course, there are of course intimations of this in the west just as much as in the East. For example, to go back to something that is, oh, partly superstitious to my point of view, that is to say, astrology, astrology does not seem to me to be an effective method of predicting the future. But it had some sense to it in that when a child was born and people consulted the astrologers, what he did was to draw a map of the person's soul, his character. And this map consisted in a symbolic picture of the universe as it was at the moment when the child was born. Now, if the picture of that child's soul is the same thing as a picture of the universe, it Shows that your soul is not in your body, your body is in your soul. And what your soul is, is the entire pattern of everything that there is focused at the point, you know, as here and now. Just like you can focus the sun on a small point with a. With a magnifying glass. Now, we know this to be true from the point of view of 20th century Western science. The science of ecology, which studies the relationship between organisms and environments, is very acutely aware in an intellectual way that an organism, whether human or animal or insect or plant, it doesn't matter what it is, is not merely something in an environment. Like you might say, you are in this room. But the organism and the environment behave together. They go with each other. In the sense of the saying in the Gospels, figs do not grow on thistles, nor grapes on thorns. Has this application that human beings do not grow in a cosmos which is unintelligent. If human beings are intelligent, and we define intelligence as the behavior of human beings, their way of thinking, feeling, and so on, you will not get an intelligent organism in an unintelligent environment. An apple tree doesn't grow apples all the time. Planets and stars do not produce life all the time, but every so often they do. So if an apple tree may be said to apple. This kind of universe in which we live, peoples, it's a peopling world and we go with it. But the problem, you see, is we don't feel that in the ordinary way. We feel strangers in the earth and so talk about the conquest of nature and facing facts and all that nonsense. So there is proposed then here a transformation of our everyday consciousness, which is a new kind of sensation. The sensation that what is going on outside you is all one process with what's going inside you and that you are all that there is. Now, you don't necessarily know this in the same way as you know something else out over there. Let me just take this illustration. Conscious attention, which is the faculty we use most to negotiate and get around, is rather like the headlight of a car. And the headlight illumines the road in front, but it does not shine on the wiring that connects the headlight with the battery and the battery with the engine. So in the same way, our conscious attention does not inspect the insides of our brains, Unless you're a brain surgeon and you look at somebody else's brain and start to figure out how it works. So we are not ordinarily aware of how we're aware. And as a result of that, we. We don't understand our connection with the world, and we are unaware of what our real self is. Therefore, we get anxious. We're afraid that death may be the end of us and that somehow we'll just pass out of this world altogether and that'll be that. Well, this is, of course, the purest superstition, because everybody is indestructible. We as individual organisms, as what we call physical bodies, we come and go like leaves on a tree. But there's the tree and you are the tree. In the saying of Jesus, I am the vine, you are the branches. But that I am before Abraham was I am is the self and is what the Hindus call the Brahman and the Chinese call the Dao. And the dao is curious word. It's done more or less like this. This part of it, this character. This part of the character in here is the human eye. When you put this on top of it, it means the face or the self. And when you put this over it, it means a kind of a flame coming down. And so the whole. This part of it means intelligence. This part, which is called the radical of the character, means rhythmic movement, going on and stopping. And so the basic idea in this is that life is a dance, a flowing dance which consists of going on and stopping. That is to say what the Chinese call Yang and Yin. Yang is the southern side or the sunny side of a mountain. And it's written this way. It is the sunny south side of a mountain or the north bank of a river. Wherever the sun falls, Yin is then the shadow side. Now, imagine a mountain with only one side. Nobody can. A river with only one bank. Yang and Yin. Now, life, you see, is entirely a game of. Now you see it, now you don't. On, off, a wave moves in crests and troughs. Now, you can't have a wave unless you have both a crest and a trough. This is true in hydraulics, in terms of water, in electronics, in terms of physics. Without the one, you don't have the other. And so the relationship between these two things is called. This is the most important term there is in, In Taoist philosophy is called mutual arising. And it's done like this. This is the. The most important idea in the whole thing. This character means reciprocal or mutual. And this is based on an old ideogram for a plant growing, a rise to come into being. And they've hoped the fundamental idea is that the Yang and the Yin come into being together. You never find one without the other. There's a sort of secret conspiracy, like tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle so that although they are different, like front and back are different, high and low are different, being and non being are different, nevertheless, they always go together. So that to be or not to be is not the question, see, it is the question for the west, for all existentialist thinking. To be or not to be, that really is the question. Therefore, man must necessarily be anxious, trembling always. The moment he knows that he is, he faces the possibility that he might not be, and so he trembles. But for Chinese thought, to be and not to be. This is a phrase from the. The dowager. They put it this way. They have. See, I'm going to amplify this. To be is written thus, and it also means to have and not is written thus. So to be, not to be mutually come to arise. Now, that's the point. Now, if you don't know that, you're anxious because you're always afraid that the darkness or the not being side might win over the light or the being side. But once you get the secret that they are inseparable and that you couldn't have nothing without something. You can't have space without solids, and you can't have sounds without silence. Because what we call sound, if you have a continuous sound, the sound of a note is actually a vibration, and it's on, off, on, off, on, off, on, off at a terrific speed. So they. They see the world as the Yang and the Yin, the on and the off as inseparable brothers or lovers, if you want to put it that way. Because they always say the Yang is male and the Yin is female. Inseparable lovers that are always there, although they may move at different vibrations, for example, the vibration of a sound. The Yang and yin alternate very rapidly, but in terms of the birth and death of galaxies, they go, from our point of view, very, very slowly. Billions and billions of years, but it's the same process. Long or short, makes no difference. And you see, therefore, that constitutes the fundamental Chinese view of the world. The. The Hindus have the same thing in other terms, but we're not discussing that today. So because of this, then, the individual person comes to feel that he is not something strange in this world. He comes to feel that he's an expression of it and that the world is himself rather than his physical body alone. His physical body? Yes, that's you. And it has a certain degree of independence, but it's an expression of the whole thing in the same way as a wave is an expression of the ocean. See, the ocean Waves says, yoo, I'm here. So in the same way the whole cosmos waves with you and says, hi. And to the other waves, hello, glad to meet you. But we are all really the one center expressing itself, playing in an infinite variety of ways. Now then you say, well, what does this lead to in terms of practical consequences? Well, it leads to a respect for the external world as one's own body. It leads to knowing how to get with it, knowing how to do things, to act with the grain rather than against the grain. The most important lesson that ancient China has to teach the modern west, the modern technological west, is how to get with it. Because you see, we have in technology this fantastic power for altering the, not only the external environment, but for altering ourselves. We can buy technology by neurological surgery and by drugs and all sorts of things. We can change our own brains and begin to interfere technologically with our own characters, let alone the external world, the way we push that around. So in order to do this properly, you have to have a non hostile feeling between yourself and what you're going to control. You have to feel one with it. Now let me give you just a certain practical illustration of this. All over California there is vast building going on because we have to take care of a very rapidly expanding population. We live in an absolutely gorgeous natural environment in a place like this here. It is just beautiful. Now the most asinine thing for us to do would be to live in this lovely environment and spoil it by living in it. That's ridiculous. So if you are a skillful architect who works on the principle of the tradition of Taoist and Zen architecture, you go to your environment, let's say it's this great hill here, and you say to it, good morning. And you even bow so to it and say, what kind of, I want to live here. But what kind of house would you like to have on you? Well, the hill says, I would like a house that will disrupt me as little as possible because I have a game going on here. I have a huge complexity of plants and insects and small animals that manage to keep this hill here. All these plants retain the hill, they prevent it from falling down, they prevent avalanches and all sorts of things like that. So the hill suggests to the sensitive artist or architect to build a house that does not interfere with, with the ecology of the hill. And so he thinks, now how will I do this? And he comes up with a solution where the only alteration he need make to the hill is to build some sort of a road to the house. But actually what we are doing instead of that is we are going into our hills with bulldozers and we are terracing them so as to make room for houses that would be appropriate on flat land and put them in the hills. Now we need the flat land for agriculture. All flat land anywhere available in California should be farmed and people should live in the hills. But in order to do that we've got to understand how to treat hills, you see. So if you look at the way the hills on the north side and the east side of Kyoto have been civilized, why they never did any of that thing. They have the most beautiful way of concealing houses in the hills so that you hardly know they're there. They don't have any bulldozers. And the way the farmers have adapted their land to the landscape and done contour farming in the hills, it's exquisite. So that a country of which 80% of the land is non arable because it's mountain has been made in combination with the sea, 80% self supporting. It's simply fantastic. They farm the sea, they eat seaweeds and things that we don't eat. And all along the California coast there is a fantastic abundance of uneaten food, kelp, if you know how to cook it, it's just great. And. But we have to learn these lessons, you see, in order to get by because we are going to have a terrible time if we don't learn them. So this is the principle that is called in, in Taoist philosophy, Wu wei. And this again second to this other expression here that I gave you, mutually arising. Wu wei. We'll do it this way. Wu again, this is the not character, the negative way. This means not to force things. That's the best English translation I've come to the it's sometimes translated not doing, no artificiality, no interference, but our word forcing, as when a forced laugh, forcing, a lock, forced behavior, forced kindness, forced love. In that sense, forcing, don't force it. So it means action in accordance with the character of the moment and of the circumstances in which you're acting. You see, you can't not interfere with the world. Everything you do interferes with your environment. And nobody knows this better than a chemist or physicist, because he realizes, especially the physicist, that whenever he so much as inspects the behavior of electrons, the things he has to do to inspect their behavior, alter the way in which they behave. In other words, shine a light on something to look at it. And that bombardment of light affected, especially at the nuclear level. So in another way, let's Say you, you put fertilizers in the soil and that alters the ground. Now, ground that has had fertilizers put into it is not the same kind of ground as ground that. Hasn't you understood the ground before you put the fertilizers in it and decided what to put in. But after you've put in it, you've got to study it all over again to see what's happened, to know what to do next time. And you see, this constantly keeps moving. To know things is to change them. You cannot not interfere. So the idea is to learn how to interfere skillfully. That's meaning of wu wei. Now then, there comes one other term that I have to discuss with you. That is, this thing is. Is, you see, mutually arising. In other words, everything goes together. You go together with your environment in such a way that you and your environment are one being. This wu wei, not interfering how to act with the grain. And then there's one other thing that has to be understood which goes into this. This term is not found in ancient Taoism, but it is found in Zen. It comes in later Chinese philosophy, but it's based historically on the Taoist view of the world. And this is the word lee. Lee. Now, this is a very fascinating expression. It means originally markings in jade, grain in wood, and fiber in muscle. Western scholars have translated it reason or principle. But this isn't very good. It doesn't give the feeling of it. Lee is the word used to designate the character of the order of nature. And so our scholars tend to translate it the laws of nature. See, but the Chinese have no word the. That we can correctly translate as the laws of nature. Because they don't look upon nature as obeying laws. They look upon it as orderly but not legal. They do have a word for law. The word. And this character, when it was originally a picture, was. Was like this. That is a sacrificial iron cauldron with a knife beside it. Well, many, many centuries ago, there was a certain emperor who wrote the laws of the country, had them caused to be inscribed on the sacrificial cauldrons, so that when the people came to offer sacrifices, they would read the laws inscribed on the cauldrons. But he was told by his sages that that was a very wrong thing to do because if you write the laws down, people start fighting. And we know this, don't we, all too well. See, in our jurisprudence, lawyers will talk in their. In their conversation about different judges. They will say, well, this kind of man has a good Sense of law. He knows the book, but he has no sense of equity. He does everything by the book. Whereas a good judge has a sense of equity, which means that he knows that circumstances alter cases, but every case is different. And he is, what a kind of person, we would say, who has an innate sense of fair play. Now, you cannot write down the rules of fair play. It's too complicated to be put into words. Just in the same way exactly. That we cannot describe our own nervous system. It's too complicated and will always elude us, although we'll get somewhere near it all right. Now, the judge who understands equity goes beyond law because he is informed with this principle. Lee and Lee, meaning the markings in jade, is like this. When you get a piece of jade and look at its markings, you don't think of them as chaotic. When you see a dirty old ashtray with cigarette butts in it and rolled up bits of paper and pieces of Kleenex and things that everybody's throw away, you know that that's a mess. And you don't want that kind of a mess around. You get rid of it. But when you look at the patterns on rocks or the shapes of clouds or the outlines of trees, you've got something which isn't orderly in the sense of being symmetrical. It doesn't form fours, you know, but you know, it's beautiful. And so the painter in the Western tradition has copied clouds and trees. And everybody, when he copies clouds and trees, they say, well, that's a picture, I know what that's about. But clouds don't mean anything. They're not a picture of anything. They're just clouds. They're just clouding. And so the poem blue mountains are spontaneously blue mountains. White clouds are spontaneously white clouds. They just do that, you see, that's their game. But they are definitely something that we recognize as having an order and not being chaos. But we can't quite pin down wherein that order consists. We know it is order and we can analyze it physically, chemically, and we can find out a lot about the behavior of surface tensions, which are a way of explaining why bubbles in water form the way they do, why clouds form the way they do, etc, etc, etc. But what we get is only an approximation to it. Like, for example, when you measure a piece of land, you're a surveyor and you reduce it to so many small triangles, and you measure those triangles and that measures the land. That's only an approximation to what's actually there. Fine, so far so good. But we never quite get it. So There is this always ungraspable, indefinable principle of order in things, which is li. And that explains why Chinese art appreciates, in all that it does, a certain element of the uncontrolled. Now, you see, when you use, for example, a brush, let's take it right here or here, the brush runs a little dry, and you're at the mercy of the hairs of this brush. Now, some painters like to let everything go wild. In a certain sense, the man who did that has let things go pretty wild, see? But what the ideal that they're aiming at is, and which you have to be a tremendous master to accomplish, is to let it go wild within limits. To create a situation which overall is orderly, but allows for the unexpected, random surprises. And so they look upon our daily life in exactly the same way. I was talking about bees earlier on, and somebody suggested to me the other day that bees are quite remarkable for this reason that every bee does exactly what it feels like doing. And yet it's all orderly. Imagine that supposing you could get up at the beginning of the day and live in such a way that you did just exactly what you personally wanted to do. You didn't pay any attention about what anybody else thought of doing or schedules or anything like that. You did just what you felt like. But it so turned out that what you felt like was what everybody else felt like doing with you. And it was an orderly performance. Well, the bees have it. And so to follow the dao is to acquire the art of doing exactly what you feel like doing. And at the same time, it's wu wei, in the sense that it does not force anything or anybody or impose on. Now you see what a marvelous accomplishment that is. But I have to give you this morning one other term that is important. To understand this, To do that, to act naturally. You have to understand this word, which in Chinese is called run. That which is so with this means so. This means self. Self. So what is so of itself? This is pronounced this run. And this we translate into English, nature. Although it's very unlike our word nature. It means what happens without being shoved, without being forced. What is so of itself? What happens naturally. We do have it in that sense. It comes naturally. When we say that, it's second nature, something like that. When we say that, we get this thing. So the dao, the passage in Lao Tzu's writing where he says the dao's method is to be so of itself. Now, we have had a. An image of the universe in which it's run by somebody. The Lord God is in control, and he made it all, he engineered it all. He understands all about it, and he remains in control. The Chinese is exactly the opposite. It looks upon the universe as not being in control at all, but as being perfectly orderly of itself. So he says, the Great Dao flows everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. And when good things are accomplished, it lays no claim to them. So there's a poem in Zen which says, entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass. Entering the water, he doesn't make a ripple because he was so in accord with the scene. And he flowed so easy through it that nobody noticed. When there's a. There's a piece of calligraphy on the other side of that board there, which is done by Sabro Hasagawa, is the Chinese characters 1, 2, 3. And hung this up in my office and said to Hasegawa, well, Dr. Suzuki is coming tomorrow and I'm going to have this up here for him to see. Dr. Suzuki, as you know, as the great Zen scholar. And Hasegawa said, I hope he won't notice it. And, you know, this wasn't modesty, saying, if I had done it really well, he wouldn't notice it. So there's a kind of anonymity in this.
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You've been listening to Alan Watts in Zen and the Art of the Controlled Accident. This recording and podcast was produced in cooperation between the Alan Watts Organization and the Ram Dass Be Here now podcast network. Our music today is by Zakir Hussain from the Rhythm Experience album released by Moment Records. Please Visit the Alan Watts.org site and also the Art of Alan Watts site for playful interaction with the themes that Alan expressed today.