J. COURTLAND ELLIOTT: My name is Court Elliott, and I would like to welcome you to the first part of the 10th Anniversary Canadian Ninpo Seminar. Ten years ago, Ninpo was first introduced to Canada. I was lucky enough to be there, and I'm lucky enough still to be here. Our host for this evening's talk is Professor Neil McMullin, the Director of the Graduate Centre for Religious Studies and a noted Tendai scholar, and I would like to ask him to say a few words.

PROFESSOR NEIL MCMULLIN: Thank you, Court, and good evening. There is a custom in Japan, according to which, when one stands before a group of people whom one does not know, one says to the people 'dozo yoroshiku'. 'Dozo' means 'please', and 'yoroshiku' means 'be good to me'. So, dozo yoroshiku. It's my pleasure to have the task of introducing the person whom you have come to see. I've been asked by Court to say a little bit about Tendai Buddhism.

My own field is the study of Tendai Buddhism, Tendai being the Japanese name of the older school, I suppose, the Chinese school, T'ien T'ai Buddhism. There are only about four or five of us in North America, as far as I know - and I would know otherwise - who are studying this particular tradition. And I would say there are two reasons why one would, should, or might find it interesting to do this. One is, that Tendai is the grand, eclectic, intellectual, rubrical, liturgical, institutional Buddhist tradition in all of these things. There are some people who suffer under the illusion that Zen Buddhism is sort of the representative form of Buddhism, but I think that one can rather easily make the case that Tendai is the grand bearer of the Buddhist intellectual tradition. And not just intellectual, but - I am reminded when I saw these mandalas flashed on the screen back here - it is also the grand ritual tradition. That is to say, that the font of all major - no exaggeration - intellectual activity, ritual activity, lineage activity in Japan for just over twelve hundred years now is found in the Tendai tradition, and our speaker tonight is ordained in the Tendai tradition.

The other reason why Tendai is most worthy of study - and it's as close as I get myself to the Ninjutsu tradition - is that, at least in Japanese history, the martial arts tradition is first known, as far as I can tell, around the end of the 9th and early in the 10th century, at the head monastery of the Tendai School of Buddhism. There is a type of monk that appeared, so to speak, at the Enryaku-Ji (Chief Tendai temple) just outside of Kyoto, that was referred to as a Sohei. The word 'so' is the ideograph for 'monk' or 'priest', and 'hei' is the ideograph for 'warrior'. So there was a group, if not a class, if not an organization, of people called 'sohei' - warrior-monks. We expect that they must have had some kind of organized tradition, some kind of self consciousness of their own practice, and in fact Professor David Waterhouse here gave a talk on this very topic about a week ago I guess at the Oriental Society of Toronto.

So, in a sense, what we have combined here tonight is one whole lineage of the Tendai tradition, namely the doctrinal, the esoteric, primal tradition in the form, at least, of this mandala, and the other side, actually the side that I'm more interested in terms of my research, namely the 'sohei', the warrior-monk tradition, which, at least, in some modern version we have personified over here in the form of Mr. Hayes. So, as the cliche goes, without further ado, I myself much look forward to and would love to hear a good explication of this (points to mandalas), and therefore will turn over the floor to someone more courageous than I.

STEPHEN K. HAYES: Thank you Professor McMullin and good evening. I got involved in this Tendai, esoteric Buddhist practice kind of through a back door, through my martial arts studies, and here I am speaking to you tonight, aware very much that with people like Dr. McMullin and Dr. Waterhouse sitting here in the auditorium, it's kind of like a cough drop salesman addressing the College of Surgeons. (laughter) But I'm going to give you my best shot at my experience of this.

As I mentioned, I started out through martial arts. So I discovered this almost by accident, or by mistake. How many of you in the audience are involved or have done some kind of martial art training? Okay, a lot of you. How many of you have formally studied the Tendai esoteric Buddhist tradition? A few. More sluggers than meditators here. So you can identify, maybe, when you went into your first martial art classes, the kinds of things that you may have expected to get. I don't know about you, but I remember what I expected to get. I started out as a five-year-old - I didn't start training then, but that's when I started getting ready to train. I was obsessed with this. I mean, I was fascinated by the idea of these warrior beings of character and enlightenment. This was what I was ready to go find when I went to my first strip shopping centre martial arts school and signed up for training. How about you? Is that what you were looking for?

Remember the old Kung Fu TV show? Some of you weren't even born when that program was on, so we're going into ancient history here. Do you remember that, there were these monks who were the epitome of enlightened wisdom on one hand, but if you rubbed them the wrong way, they could knock you out in a heart beat with a flying foot? Well I thought that was an admirable thing to approach/study/be (laughter). Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have, on one hand, the ability to deal with all personal security issues, and on the other hand, feel safe to be as kind and benevolent and as helpful in society as we could be? Well, that was my original goal, and a lot of martial artists I talk to, when I mention that, we all sort of grin together, and have a little chuckle over it because probably, like me, you didn't have a whole lot of teachers who were available to approach the study of the martial arts that way when you began.

Now, I found a lot of people who had a lot of the pieces. Indeed, I remember certain teachers that were just like thunder and lightning. I mean, feet flying every which way, and they'd have you pinned to the mat in a heart beat, but once they took off their 'gi', their training uniform, they weren't the kind of folks I wanted to spend a lot of time with. Then I met other people who were the opposite. They had all kinds of grades, you know, these belt things that people wear with the stripes and fringe, and more degrees than a thermometer hanging on that thing. Wonderful people, and they spoke a lot about the ideal of warriorship and so forth, but they had to become careful who they let come into the training hall, because really there was nothing physical to back it up. So, I refer to these as the 'partial arts' (laughter). We might have little bits of this, little bits of that. What I did was I kind of wandered around and studied with a lot of these people that had a lot of these parts to offer, and a lot of you can identify with that as well.

I finally got to the point where I just couldn't find any more of that which I was looking for here in North America. So I took a wild gamble and I ended up going to Japan. I had read in a James Bond novel that there were these warriors called Ninja in Japan. It sounded pretty good to me. This was everything I was looking for in a martial art. Later on I talked to some Japanese people who assured me that well, no, they don't exist. That was only a James Bond novel, right? They also have little laser things that they'd usually carry around in their belt buckle and all kinds of things that James Bond has that were just made up for fun. Well, it was pretty heartbreaking, so heartbreaking that I didn't want to believe it. Have you ever done that, where, against rational thought and everything you know to be true, you do something anyway? So my superstition was, well, they must really exist, and this is some kind of a screen here to keep me from getting this.

Anyway, I went to Japan and was accepted in a 34-generation-old tradition, which in itself is pretty amazing. You know, a lot of times, when I told people that, they'd say "Really? You mean, you didn't have to prove yourself? I mean, I've heard stories about Zen monasteries where you'd have to sit there for three days just waiting to get into the place. And other martial arts, they're real rough on people and you have to clean up the toilet for the sensei for a year before they teach you even how to hold a sword." I said, "No, I was quite honoured. They accepted me the first night." The grandmaster met me in this little inn and said "Tomorrow night you can train with this man here, who is one of our seniors, and he'll show you how to begin training."

So, of course I was overwhelmed with the significance of all this. Here I'd come through all of these lifetimes to come to this special inn and meet this person, and they were so ready to accept me. Years later I heard their side of the story. A friend of ours from Japan was speaking with my wife Rumiko, and she was telling the story about when I was first accepted, and this man, in characteristic Japanese fashion, cocked his head a little bit, looked sideways out of his eyes, and said something to the effect of "Oh, oh, is that what he thought was going on?" (laughter) See, what it was - and I didn't know this - compared to these people in the school, I was a big guy. And I had come over from America all open, polite and everything. So the head man had told a couple of his senior students, "Have fun with this guy. See if this stuff really works. And when he's done, he'll go away, and we can get back to regular training." (laughter)

I didn't know this. It was such a small school that I figured this was the way they handled all the new people. Oh, it was brutal. It was brutal, and I loved it, because here I could really see the kind of techniques that I'd been looking for all my life. I just thought they were that brutal with everybody. It was only later on that I learned the truth. So, in some cases ignorance will assist you to get places.

I stayed in there, and the other thing that was amazing to me, the more I looked at a lot of this brutal physical work, the way that worked was they would show me a particular technique, and in order to convince me of the validity of the training in this, they'd show me how it worked. And they had all these little sneaky spots that I could be hit on the body where I couldn't tense up any muscle because there isn't any muscle, and in fact the more I would tense up the worse it would hurt. And so what I discovered as the months turned into years, was that what they were doing really was showing me where I was vulnerable, and making the statement that there are certain spots on the human body where you just are vulnerable. There's no way you're going to be not vulnerable and that's it. So, you've got a couple of choices. You can either change truth - you can make human bodies not be that way anymore. Well, that's going to be a hard one to do. Or, maybe what you can do is learn to put up with it, learn how a human body can adapt to it.

So what I had to do was get used to not being driven crazy by these techniques. And, in fact, I remember one night, the first night when I was able to make this kind of a breakthrough. It was a horrible technique, where the teacher would grab me by the lapels of my training suit , pull me forward and then turn his thumbs in at the same time, go right underneath the larynx into where it's flexible, like a rubber hose or tube. And what he would do is hit both sides of that at the same time so that the rubber tube would flex in and the sides of my windpipe would touch each other. It's rubbery, so it pops right back open, but it was the most awful experience I've had in my whole life. Everything would go white and I'd be sort of scrambling around trying to get out of there. And I remember he used to delight in doing this (laughter) to show me that the technique worked, and also to prove it to the other students. I still remember the night when he did that again, and there it was, that same awful sensation. But my eyes stayed open, and hurt though it did, my hands found their way to his lapel and his arm and I pulled his arm off my throat. Now this was the grandmaster of this ancient warrior lineage we're talking about here. So that's about as far as I went. You don't get cute in those kind of places, you know (laughter).

What a breakthrough. Yes, it hurt, yes it was annoying, but I was able to go right on through it. And then I was introduced to the idea that, well, training doesn't stop here, either, you see, because if an enemy can't get you with their body, they'll get you with the mind. And so another phase of my training began, where they would tell me one thing and I'd get to just where I believed in that, and all of sudden they'd completely change their story and claim that what I had been told wasn't true at all. This was equally painful. To be honest, maybe even more painful, because I didn't know where it was coming from. Confusion, intellectual confusion.

When this training began was when I first became familiar with this word 'Mikkyo', or these esoteric Buddhist teachings, because this confusion of the mind and the ability to just go through that and not make it stop-just like I couldn't make the physical technique stop-was what I had to do to get myself to a position where it no longer dominated me, where it no longer immobilized me. The same with these mental aspects. And so I went through several years of that training, and it didn't stop there either. Beyond that was what you might call spiritual training, and it happens the same way, where the teacher's job is to dis-spirit the student. This means calling up everything that we hold to be dear and true and honest and right and so forth about life, and making a mockery out of it. How to look in someone's eyes and express absolute commitment, friendship and love, and the next day have that person be the one who's causing your downfall. These are things that happen in life and they dis-spirit us, if we let them, just like to be touched on the throat will take all the fight out of an individual, if we let it.

So this is where I began my investigation in this phenomenon known as Mikkyo. Mikkyo, translated literally, means 'himitsu' or a secret, or something held close, and 'kyo' is knowledge, in this case 'bukyo' which means knowledge of Buddhism - so the secret, the secret teachings, the secret doctrine. And these are called secret, not so much because it's this thing that we want to keep from everybody else. Oh, there's a little bit of that in there, the mystery of it. But the real essence of this secret doctrine means that it's esoteric. You can show somebody this on the surface, and they still don't get it. It's the same with our martial art. We're not here to do a demo - we're going to do that later this weekend - but with a lot of things in our martial art, if people come in and watch it, they don't understand how it works. We touch a person here and move our body this way, and all of sudden they're flying into the wall. "What is this, the Vulcan death touch you guys are doing here, or what?" (laughter) No, no, but it's just that when you put your pressure here and you move your body, the kinesthetics, just the way it moves, it shoves that person against where they think their balance is going to be...and see, this doesn't make any sense, does it? You have to see it, you have to feel it. It's the same with this particular approach to Buddhist teachings. You can't really read it and get it and go "Oh, okay, got that", and move on. There has to be an experience. So therefore it's called the secret, or the esoteric. What's on the surface doesn't always make sense. You've got to go deeper into that.

Well, I began my training in this, in this martial arts school, and as I kept going with this, I discovered certain things, certain images, certain references that showed up in our technique. One of the references were these mandala prints, which we've illustrated here. They're giant graphics. When I first saw that, coming from the West, I didn't know anything about Buddhism or anything about Eastern religions. Oh, when I was in college I read a few books on Taoism, which, back in 1969, everybody did. You know, we all thought that we were Taoists because that made so much sense. But that was all. So, when I came to here, I was thinking about Christian saints and angels and gods, and gee, they've sure got a lot of gods on there. Look at all of those there. How would you even know which one to pray to, and for what? And most of the people I asked about it really didn't even try to give me any better idea. In fact, they would tell me "All these are gods. This one here is the Goddess of Mercy. It's called Kannon. This one here is Monju. That's the God of Scholars, of people who study."

So I'm looking at all of these gods and goddesses, again, wondering how people would keep all that straight. Well, it's certainly not anything I wanted to get into. But it was interesting because it was on the wall, and was part of the heritage. What I wanted to find out is how to not have my windpipe fold up every time the guy grabs me there, or how to not get confused by all these tactics and things, and certainly how to not lose my spirit in a time of great conflict, when I might need to be the one who had all the spirit. That's what I wanted to learn about.

Well, as it turned out for me, this was my way in, the key in. It was a temporary discipline that I had to do. I had to look at these and begin to study. So what I want to share with you tonight are a few observations on how this works. Ultimately these are not gods and goddesses, I can tell you that right up front. That was a convenient translation that some people gave to me. They're not gods and goddesses the way we might think of them over here. Indeed, these represent processes by which we can come to recognize different levels of reality. I'll just say that and drop that, and we'll come back to that a little bit later on.

So what I want to share with you tonight is how some of these processes work, maybe some of my own experiences with that. And as you can see, there are a lot of faces on there. A lot of characters we're not going to define for you, or even tell you how each one works, or even attempt to do that. But maybe in some broad strokes how we might approach this, how this might work. Also, we'll save a little bit of time at the end of our session here tonight in case there are some specific questions that you would like to ask.

(Refers to Taizokai Mandala on wall) Now, you can see a lot of faces on there, a lot of things going on. There's a lot of material behind this, where it came from, the history, the lineage behind it. I'm not even going to touch on that. There are books you can read about that. What I would like to do tonight is to refer more to some of my experiences with these, and how I came to discover this in a backwards sort of way.

There are, as you saw, two of these mandala, and this one here is referred to as Taizokai mandala, and actually I'm not going to refer too much to this one in tonight's lecture, just because of time. But I like to use this as an illustration of a concept. And again, any one thing I say tonight, I better warn you right up front, any one thing I say here tonight is going to have about eight or nine contradictions if you look at it from a different way. It's just the nature of the phenomenon. As Dr. McMullin mentioned earlier, most of us, when we think of Japanese Buddhism, probably think of Zen. Even if you don't know anything about Buddhism - "Oh, Zen". It became very popular, and most people don't even know that there is a thing such as Tendai or esoteric Buddhism. It's very complicated to get across. Have any of you ever done a Zen workshop? A couple of you, okay. Pretty straight forward, huh? You go in, there's some basic explanations, and then you do the practice. In fact, if you ask too many questions, remember what the Roshi did when you asked too many questions? He gave you a funny look and told you, "You better sit down for a little while longer. Too intellectual, get out of your head. This is an experience." It's much easier, I think, to transmit Zen. This is going to be very complicated.

What this represents, then, are some processes. And as I mentioned here, any one thing I say is going to have about eight or nine contradictions. Kind of like your house. You can imagine somebody describing your house. If you think of your front door and the steps that lead to your front door, you might even have a snapshot of that. And then here's the front door, and what do you see when you open the door and go in? Well you have some kind of an entryway, right? Okay, so you got that snapshot, and adjacent to that maybe there's a living room in there. You go through the living room and here's a dining area, and then you're back at the kitchen. And that's your house. Now if somebody else were to describe it, it's "No, no, all wrong. The kitchen is what's first, and then next to the kitchen is a dining room, and then you go into a living room, and then you go to the reception. You're all wrong." Well, who is right? It just depends on which door you came into the house. So, alright, you have all these different doorways represented in the mandala. What I'm doing is setting myself up for the fact that some of the things I'm going to say here tonight are going to be extremely limited. Your own experience may get you to look at it a different way. I'm going to talk about some of my experiences in here.

I like this, because, from one way of interpreting it, this central character here, who is called 'Dainichi Nyorai' , is a way to think of absolute, total, all-inclusive consciousness of the universe. And again, this is going to be words. It's hard to identify with, but let's see what we can do. What if the entire universe, past, present and future, were operating in a totally integrated and brightened and enlightened place where every aspect of the universe - you, me, the chair, our dog, our grandmother's dog - every aspect of that universe is totally conscious of what it is supposed to be in relationship to the whole. Imagine such a thing. Anyway, that might be one explanation of what this experience might be like.

Well, I don't know. There's not too much we can do about the universe per se, as an individual listening in a lecture room here. So what I'd like to do tonight is limit most of this to a look at ourself. See, anything that's going on in the universal process has its mirror in our body, and that's a belief system that comes along with this study, that I'm a mirror - I'm not odd, I'm not different. We, as structures of spirit and physical matter moving around in the universe, are not different from natural law. We don't contradict natural law, as if we were just somehow created to be totally different. We reflect natural law. So, if we study Nature and its natural law, made up of atoms that produce hard things like our nails, and fluid things like our blood, and warmth like our breath and our metabolism, and gaseous things like our breath and so forth, we can look down to these elements, or we can look up to these in grander concepts, grander principles as they work. Where I'm really going to relate this to tonight is right in between, in the human realm.

What if this were me? What if this were you? Look at all these faces that you have there. Can anybody imagine yourself looking like this, all of these faces there? Well, sure. Don't people call you different things? I know they do me. So, I mean, here I am centred, if I'm really together, and I'm in balance and I'm looking squared away at the world. There are moments when I'm approaching this kind of centredness, but most of the time I have a particular role I'm playing. I'm somewhere out here in the specifics, where, maybe what it is that one person calls me 'father'. That's what they call me. When they say "dad", I turn around, I know just who they are. But another person doesn't call me 'dad'. Another person calls me 'son'. So that's two different roles that I have. Now which is the real me? Is the real me the son or is the real me the dad? Well, it depends on who is asking. It just depends on who is asking. Other people call me 'husband'; other people call me 'sensei/teacher'. Other people call me 'student' as my title in their place. And there are some descriptive terms that other people call me. We have all these roles that we play. Some of them we can identify with; some of them we can't identify with.

Anybody ever insult you? Some people call me a 'jerk', or other terms that maybe I wouldn't want to use out here. To them, I am that. That's the role I play. Now I don't see myself like that necessarily, but they do. Here I am, I'm driving along, I'm moving around, I know I've got to get over to that lane of traffic there, because I've got something important to do; I'm going to help this person here. So I look in my mirror - nobody there - alright, I signal and I get over. Well, they've just happened to have come around me in some way, so instead of being Stephen Hayes, this person who just needed to be in that space at that time, while he was out doing some nice things in the world, no, I become 'that jerk in the jeep'. And I'm probably referred to for the rest of the day as 'that jerk in the jeep', and the person will go around and probably tell a lot of his friends about how he almost had a wreck with 'that jerk in the jeep' (laughter). I don't identify with it but nonetheless it was a role that I played in someone's life on that particular afternoon.

So, we may want to think about it that these are all faces that make us up. Some of them don't come out and make themselves very obvious. See, up until nine years ago, no-one called me dad. That wasn't a term that was used. So it was sort of on reserve. I use this word 'archetypes'. They're like archetypes, they're things down in us, they're potentials that have their way of coming out. So being a dad was on reserve. And there are other ones that are on reserve. So maybe we can think of this as the human make-up with all of these as faces on reserve.

But what's this mean, what's the point of it? What's the value of it? Well, the value is, that if we understand that we are going to be playing different roles from moment to moment in life, and that ultimately, there really is no 'me' per se...Well, which am I? Am I the jerk in the jeep, or am I dad? Or am I the guy who didn't do his chemistry lesson in the tenth grade very well? Where am I? Who am I, really? And the more diligently I try to pin that down, of course, the more frustrating it becomes. So, if we can give that up, if we can let go of that, and accept the fact that it's all conditional, it's all conditional....it's conditioned by who is making the reference...it's even more conditional than that. The guy who thinks of me as the jerk in the jeep, he's conditional too. See, he had certain things that happened to him that day or that month or that lifetime that led him up to responding angrily when somebody pulled in front of him, even after he signaled and the lane was clear. So, it's even more conditional than we might dream.

Well, if it's all conditional, and it's all kind of swimming around, we have all these potentials, and hey, we've got things that we're going to be, but we aren't yet, like you're saying, Stephen, how do we begin to approach it? We begin to approach it by looking at that and saying we're not going to argue with that. Just like we're not going to argue with what causes pain in the human body, we're not going to argue with it. We're going to accept it and go with it. So, we might say that this is a model of our potential, a model of looking at our potential.

Now, in terms of the way it's actually practised, what we'll do is pick a particular character. And this is done in initiation. You might have one of these mandala layouts with all of these characters, and each one has a very specific expression on his or her face. I say his or her, but actually they're kind of asexual. Some of them look more male or look more female, but these are forces that work within us. Some of them have a sword that's on fire, and this one has in his left hand a rope that's made out of five colours, and this one over here has three eyes; this one up here has a lotus and a scroll; this one has a thunderbolt implement which looks like a little pitchfork on both ends, and they all look different. Each one represents a particular beginning focus. Maybe you could say it's where we're going to begin. It's the door that we're going to come through. How? Maybe we were born doing it. Genetically we were predisposed to see life a certain way. And that's true, right? I mean, genetically, you either see life as a male or a female, based on your birth. Genetically I'm not going to see life as a six foot four blond-haired guy. I'm just not going to do that. So, genetically, I'm predisposed to see life a certain way, and genetically, because I was born where I was born, karmically - if you're comfortable using that word - I tend to address life through the English language as a primary language. So there are all these conditioners.

Also conditioned about me is my metabolism, the way my body responds to food and air and things, that it creates a certain personality in me, and again we're all in agreement on that. Any of you know somebody that you might think of as a real hotheaded individual? Know anybody else who is a real coolheaded individual? Sure, certain ones pop into our mind. We think about that. Why? Do they study how to be hotheaded? Did you practise how to get angry easily? "Yes, I remember as a small child looking at that and considering that 'You know, I'm a little slow to anger. Maybe what I need are angry lessons.'" No, you just came by it naturally.

So that's our door in. In this initiation ceremony, we have a flower and a blindfold, and this flower is tossed and it lands somewhere on this giant mandala, and it's an indication of probably where you might want to start your search. So there's some - what would you want to call it? - fate or chance or intervention that makes the flower fall where it does, and then we begin our practice. Now, once we get there, what we're going to do is look at the strength of any one of these characters, and we're going to imitate it in three ways. This is called the San Mitsu or the three secrets. What we're going to do is take a character - maybe it's easier to identify with some of these on the periphery, because they're more detailed, more specific - as I say, one has a sword, one has a pen, and it makes a big difference. Closer to the centre, the closer to universality you get. So we're going to pick a particular character and we're going to imitate it. What we're going to do is say "Alright, if I wanted to be enlightened, what I would want to do is see the world like an enlightened being would." So, in my own mind what I do is I want to adjust my vision, so that I see things a different way. In the beginning I have to pretend, because there are jerks in jeeps that cut us off, and all kinds of stuff going on. What I have to do is pretend I'm enlightened, pretend I see the value, pretend I can identify with everything that comes along.

The other thing we're going to pretend to do is communicate our vision out into the world, either through the spoken word or the written word, or the way that we even communicate with an eyebrow or a tilt of the shoulder. So this is referred to as the secret of speech. So, what it is, I've got to pretend I've got this vision, and I work to keep it in my mind. I visualize it, I imagine myself as my goal. Maybe what I do is pick up a hero from this, and imagine myself as that. What if I were enlightened scholarship? What if I were enlightened righteousness? What if I were enlightened compassion? What would that look like? So I have a hero in my mind, and then I speak like that hero. And then I act, I imitate that hero. And again, none of this stuff is shocking when we hear about it, although it's called the 'three secrets'. None of it's shocking; it makes so much sense. I mean, people go to business classes to learn how you should wear a white shirt if your boss wears a white shirt. It comes right down to everyday nuts and bolts. It's just that the goal, maybe, that we're talking about.

(He now refers to the Kongokai mandala) So, we look at these. There are two of these images here on either side. One is called the 'Diamond Path', and the other is this 'Lotus Realm' one. I'm going to talk about some of these characters in the beginning here, just to give you an idea of where we may go. This is the central portion of that one, and there are some polarities that I'm going to talk about in here tonight. And again, this is way too brief a talk on way too deep a subject, so what I thought we might do is just look at how some of this stuff works. The idea behind these characters here is that in the centre of each one of these quadrants is an epitome of some form of what it would be like if absolute enlightened clarity were to come to some particular make-up of the world as we know it. And it relates to the physical world as we know it, the hard things. So there's an area that's associated with what we call Earth, the earth element - hard things, like our nails and teeth, hard things in the world, the physical make-up. There's water, there's fluids, fluidity. There's fire, what we would call the give and take of energy. There is wind, freedom of movement, and so forth. These are symbols that we are going to use to locate it. And in the centre is kind of a hard one for us to describe. We might call that the subatomic potential behind all the elements. We use to have this thing we call 'ether', which fell out of popularity in recent generations. Ironically now, some physicists are bringing it back, thinking that there might be something to it. And these work. They also stand for our make-up, our personal make-up. So, the title of this talk was to deal with this passion and anger, because what we're going to do is that we're going to start in, just like that guy working me over in the training hall, with our body. We learn what our limitations are; you're not going to argue with it; you're not going to change it. All we can do is recognize it and use it.

So, just for fun, let's just take a little tour around here. First, 'earth'. If that's in your nature, if that's kind of the way you came into the world, you have this proclivity to see things from a so-called 'earth'-like way. If you think of somebody as being earthy, or you're describing them as real down to earth, or this individual has two feet firmly on the ground, what kind of images come into your mind? 'Earth', a stability kind of an image, a firm, two feet on the ground kind of an image. Some of us have that nature. Now, it can go too far. If we get too far away from the centre, if we get a little bit out here, it can go too far to where we become captured by this. It starts to run our life, instead of being something that we can utilize. See, every one of these can represent a negative view, a negative orientation, because it's out of balance.

Let's say these are archetypes, or potentials in us, all of these are potentials of the way we could operate in the world, and we have one that's always working, it means one is not getting enough exercise. So, on a balance, it means one's drowning out here while the other is out here getting sun burnt, if you want to look at it that way. Or one is getting worked to death, while the other one is atrophying. Well we can do that. You may know somebody who is a single element kind of individual.

So, in the code, the way this looks, when you get too much earth in there and not enough of the rest of the balance, it provides a personality that's associated with stubbornness, seeing things only from a particular viewpoint, 'my way'. It's the individual that's willing to see both sides of every argument - "There's my side, and there's the wrong side" - you know, it's that kind of a look on it. So 'earth'. And our challenge, if that's where we are, is to see how that becomes a benefit. How does that work to assist us?

There are things that we call rituals which, often, isn't a popular word to use in North America, but a ritual, where what we're going to do is say 'okay, if that's my nature, if that's the way I am, what we're going to do is work with that in such a way that I see the value of it. I'm going to say certain things, whether I believe it or not. And I'm going to visualize certain things, whether I believe it or not. And I'm going to behave in a certain way, whether I believe in it or not. And I'm going to programme myself to bring out the best.' Now the target audience of the ritual is my subconscious mind, that thing that gets in the way of allowing me to operate as a fully functional enlightened entity. So, after I imitate it long enough, people watch and they go, "You know, you move around like a powerful, enlightened being, talk like a powerful, enlightened being, seem to see the world like a powerful, enlightened being. We thought you were one." In a lot a cases, we may be the last one to get the message. So, we're going to do that. We're going to take this kind of stubbornness, a pride that keeps us from moving ahead. And we're going to look at how that operates and make that help us out.

Way across here would be the opposite. What would be the opposite of having one way and one way only to do this particular thing, and not being willing to entertain anything else? The opposite to that kind of pride is over here in the 'wind' element - and again, 'wind'. How does that sound if a person is 'wind'? 'Leaf in the wind', 'gone with the wind', 'blowhard', all of these kind of things we talk about. You might imagine a person not being very rooted at all. Indeed, it's the opposite of this 'earth'. If 'earth' is hanging on and being too stubborn, 'wind' over here is the opposite. "I don't believe in anything I've got. All I can see is all the advantages that everybody else has. So what I think I'm going to do is try and be everything." So here's a person racing around. If this one ('earth') is stuck in the mud, this one's spinning wheels, going all over the place. Doesn't know what really works for him or her, but sees somebody doing this for this minute, and all of a sudden we're going to jump in and become a part of that cause until that fades from fashion and something else catches our eye. So it's a very racing around kind of a person, always looking at somebody else and seeing what they've got. This is 'wind' - I envy what he has, oh I wish I could do that so I'm going to run over and be that until I get there and then I'm going to see what someone else is doing. They're across from each other.

As you can see they're both limited viewpoints of life, and neither one, if we stayed there, would be particularly desirable. Well how the ritual works is - and I'm not going to go into the details but the process is pretty interesting - these people, as examples, as extremes, really are their own cure. Let me explain how that might go. What would be the opposite, if this person (earth) recognizes his or her limitations? "Yeah, I'm just a real stick in the mud. I can't help it. I always do it this way; this is my nature. There's a right way and there's your way. And it's just the way I am. I go with the tried and true and I know what's happening and I know it's a value". Then they start to see it as a limitation. How would you describe that as a limitation? "Gee, I'm narrow minded, I get stuck". This is easier to do, right? We're our own worst critics. "I get stuck in the mud, oh gee, I'm just too domineering. People can't even ask me questions; they know I'm going to shut them down all the time. I'm too cocky, I've got all the answers." Anyway, all of those, if you were to phrase it a little differently, it's this person's (wind's) solution. Or this one (earth) is a solution for that (wind) - freedom, easy going, entertaining, new view at any given time. See, that would be the cure for this (earth) This person (wind) sees themself as wishy-washy, flighty, competitive, always on the go, never having a target. What they need is a little bit more of this (earth) over here.

Now we have codes here. These are referred to as influences towards enlightenment, Boddhisattvas or Bosatsu in the Japanese language, Buddhas or Hotoke in the Japanese language. I'm not really addressing that tonight. What I'm talking about is how I got into this, how I learned it through the martial arts.

Let me take this one step closer to another kind of reality, and say, well, these are characters. If this is wisdom, if this is a form of enlightenment, who would these be in their fullest form? If that's my nature, if this 'earth' kind of being right and being in charge and holding on and knowing all the answers, if that's my nature and it were developed to its fullest extent, what would we have on our hands? And so these become keys for the way wisdom operates.

So what I like to suggest to people is, okay, on this side - 'earth' - this is called Hosho Nyorai, the Buddha that in this case is a force that works in the world, the Buddha that provides, that gives, that rewards, that traditionally is seen as providing the access to the true teachings, which are called dharma or po. It's the one who gives, stabilizes, richness, gold. All of these things are associated with this particular character. And when you remember being real little, and, you think about that person in your life, maybe not a Buddha, who gave you some boundaries, who told you what was right and what was wrong, and maybe saved your life because they did that, rewarded you when you did something well, provided an inspiration for you. Do you remember anybody who sounds like that? Sure, our parents. Remember how much you wanted to please them as a small child? Your parents, that person who just seems so grown up and brave and knew everything, and had more money than you could count, right. Yours did too, just like mine, right? When you're five they appear to. They can always reach into their pocket and give you a quarter. I thought we were rich when I was growing up until I got a little bit older. I had a talk with my dad and found out how much we didn't have. A lot of kids see their parents that way. So this could be that force, that influence.Now if we go beyond the family, who would that be? Some kind of an ideal, some kind of thing or person that causes us to be inspired, causes us to want to do great things. And we want to please this person, we want the rewards from this person. Maybe it's the emperor or the Shogun, the military leader or the commander, the ruler, and just to be around this person is a wonderful experience, and again think about it, when you were a kid, maybe you even fought with some of your brothers and sisters just to be in the eyes of your parents. Do you remember doing that at all? Couldn't get enough attention, so I'd kick this one, and she went to scream - then they'd look at me and say "He's being good..." - this kind of stuff. We all wanted to be in the space, we all wanted to be in the eyes of that one that we looked to for inspiration.

I think it's the same today. How wonderful it is to have some kind of leader, whether it's at your office or at your university or in your own realm of activity, that's worthy of your support. Well, what's the opposite? What's over here (wind), the one that moves all around? Well, if this (earth) is the leader who sits on the throne or a tiger skin and is worthy of being served, worthy of inspiration, over here Fokujoju Nyorai or Amogashibi, is the representative of all this movement, stuff going on and that's their nature, get with it and make it work as an action. So what would be the opposite of the leader? The one who serves, the one who gets things done. If the leader is inspiration, this is inspired to do things. So this is the Buddha of all accomplishing activity, or being able to always be in just the right space at the right time with just the right thing. Perfection of action, perfection of activity. And again, tonight I'm relating it to us as human beings and how we operate in our society. There's a molecular level at which this operates and there's a cosmic level. I'm not going to have time to go into those tonight.

This is the server (wind), or from my viewpoint, from the way I was trained, this was the warrior, the one who would defend. In fact the original word for 'samurai' in Japanese - maybe you've heard that word samurai, the aristocratic warrior - comes from a word samurau which means to serve. Now maybe, if you were like me when you were growing up, if you heard of the samurai, you'd remember that guy in the glistening armour with all the swords. Remember in Shogun - did you see Shogun? - when the one guy didn't bow quite fast enough and with that, 'shhhht', off goes his head? The Samurai had the right to kill anybody who wasn't polite to him. Well, wouldn't that be cool in this day and age? (laughter) We can really have a respectful society here. Well, it really probably didn't work that way. See, the samurai was the server, he was the one who protected the community, and for him to just lop somebody's head off because they bowed a little slow, it means there's one fewer rice producer now, one fewer rice producer who probably left about five or six kids and a wife. Now we've got to make up for the fact that he's not around. It's an exaggeration; it's a perversion. The samurai warrior was the one who served.

And what did they serve? Their leader. That's famous in Japanese lore. That this person, when the leader suffered shame, he himself would jump in there and share in the shame. They'd both kill themselves ritually. So, to have something worthy of being served and what a wonderful thing that is to experience. Again, like our parents, and how we remember our parents, or a great leader, or somebody of inspiration. Wasn't it wonderful? Maybe now or some time in your own life to have something that was bigger than you, that was worth any amount of sacrifice. And soldiers, protectors do this in a war. They'll go out and sleep in the mud and not eat good food, and bullets are zinging around. "Well, why are you doing that? You really like that, huh?"

"No, we don't like it. We don't have any other choice. Our little kingdom is being invaded by this big kingdom and I don't want my children to be slaves. I'll do that; I'll sleep in the mud and dodge the knives and the bullets and so forth. Why? There's something bigger than me." And we yearn for that.

So here's one polarity. How about yourself? See, there's one of these in every one of us, and it comes out more or less, depending on how we allow it to. How about yourself? Are you taking charge of your own life? Is there a ruler, is there a leader, is there an ideal that guides you and guides your life, so that you know exactly what you're doing, and exactly what you're going for? My feeling is, in North America, a lot of folks I talk to, this one's (wind) starving to death. I mean, it's crazy out there, isn't it? Everything's upside down. Just to look at the headlines, gee, the head of our church is no longer the head of our church because he and the other guys were in line to gang rape the secretary, and everything's upside down, everything's crazy. So a lot of us lack leadership, and we see a lack of leadership in our own community now, where people are willing to poison the earth. Not too far from my home, they just discovered that a particular company was drilling real deep wells way down safely underneath the water table, so they could put all of these chemicals from a manufacturing process down there. Well, it didn't work out quite as safe as they thought it was going to, of course. Where's the guy who is responsible for that? He's already fulfilled his contract for that corporation. He took his 17.6 million dollars - that's what they paid him for doing that four years of work - he's gone, living on the beach somewhere. Now, that's not isolated, is it? We hear about that kind of stuff all the time, where leadership fails us. And then the servers don't have anything to serve.

Remember all these comments? You heard them maybe here in Canada. We heard them in the U.S. The Japanese referring to the American work force...boy, the American work force didn't like to hear that, but you know what, there's a lot of truth to it. The workers don't have anything to serve over here. And the fact that there's no leadership inspires the servers to just do whatever they need to get it done. When the server becomes his own leader, that's when you have things like the samurai taking a head off, or big countries invading smaller ones. So here's a polarity in there. How about yourself? Do you have something that you're connected with that's worth serving? Something that, even though it's Monday morning, and it's a drizzly old miserable day, and it's so nice and warm under the covers, that you wouldn't even think of staying under the covers, because what you've got to do is so important that your own comfort doesn't matter? How about that? And that's one that exists in all of us. We want to serve something that's greater.

We also want to be around these. They're cultural heroes. The server in the States...we had a little 12 minute war over in Saudi Arabia a year ago, where some guys flew in bombs and bombed the cities and so forth. But the head of that battle group over there, Norman Schwarzkopf was like an instant national hero. He was in ads and he was on the cover of People magazine. Why? Because he's the closest thing we had to Ike and MacArthur and so forth in this generation, and we want to see that in our society. We want to salute the servers, the warriors. And the leader over here, too. We want to have leaders; we want to be around those kind of people. They're inspiring. Unfortunately there aren't a lot. We're trying to have a presidential election in America right now, and it's kind of pathetic down there. We're looking at all these candidates that are coming up in front of us, going, "Geez, couldn't they get anybody better than this?" Well, they could get somebody better if they paid better and you didn't get shot at all the time, and they didn't go snooping into what you did on every date that you've ever had in your life. Nobody wants the job. Why? Well, it's not a time conducive to bringing out heroes, I guess. Anyway, we like to spend time around them.

That's one polarity. This is how we operate in the world (earth). (< - >). Or, maybe we can call that polarity how we operate in the world (wind). And we're both of these. Sometimes we're the server. See, the ultimate leader is a server. The ultimate leader looks around and says, "Well, nobody else would do it. I better do it. And so I serve the interests of the people I serve, the interests of the community I serve, the interests of the spirit of the universe by taking charge and being a leader. And ultimately every server is his or her own leader, in a way. We've got to know how to best apply our gifts.

Here's another polarity. 'Water' down here and 'fire' up there. And very briefly, the so-called defilement associated with this (water) is a tendency to be alienated from people. It's an alienation from people, aversion to people. And it shows up in its extreme form as hatred or malice. And some of us have that kind of an approach, where we're just angry, we're angry and we see that other people are what gets in the way of our getting things done. Now where do we learn this? I don't know. Early last year, the Dalai Lama of Tibet was in Ohio and he was addressing a crowd and he was referring to this anger, and he said, "You know, when you think about anger, and how popular anger is. You see it demonstrated all the time and yet, what is the value of it?" Could you imagine ever going to the doctor and having the doctor look at you and say "You're in bad shape. What I suggest is that you be more angry. Be more angry more often. Increase your blood pressure and see if you can work up some more tension in your life"? Of course not. No one is ever going to predict that as a solution for health. But we're comfortable with it and we use it.

Opposite of anger is the opposite of alienation from those things outside. This (fire) would be what we might call frantic passion, where what I want to do is have everything, be in touch with everything. So if this (water) is being so self-centred inside myself that people cease to exist, and this (fire) is the opposite - there's no self in there, there's nothing home, everything's on the surface. That becomes how we operate or function in the world (this vertical axis). And again, let's look at this and how it may show up. This is water and this fire - two extremes. Inside this one here (water) is the realm of kongosatta or 'the one that inspires us to take up the study of these materials', and this again is a force that works within us.

Science I associate water with. Knowing things, so inside of myself I study and I know. So this would be the realm of the scientist, the scholar, the person who knows things, understands them. And you can learn a lot by being by yourself in a room - if you have enough books and enough videos and enough time to think about it, you don't need anybody around. This (fire) would be the opposite. This is that part of us that relates to the world and touches the world and allows it to touch us. If this is being so inside of myself, this is the opposite, on the surface. This would be, for our analogy here, maybe the artist, the one who expresses, the one who touches others. This is the artist, and this (water) is the scientist, and like the leader and the server, it's not to say that a scientist or scholar can't be an artist, or that an artist can't know things. It's just that they're extremes. Now as they show up as a negative personality, this (fire) is one who can't get enough. Enough of what? Just can't get enough of anything. Anything we get our hands on is old hat. Very surface, very flashy, where I care so much about what other people think about that I don't even notice that there's a me to think about it. So we've got to have the latest fashion, the latest style, the brightest car, the wildest hairdo. This is a disease in that aspect. So, in being fascinated by what people think, that there's nobody home in the centre.

And this (water), in its exaggerated form would be just the opposite, totally cut off from people, or anything to do with people. So, in its extremely negative form, these (fire) are the artists that become legends in our time, legends in our culture. Elvis - I know he's dead now but.... Can you imagine being Elvis Presley? Geez, good looking guy, in the old movies real lean, look at that body. Every female in America wanted to chase him around. More money than he could even imagine counting. He used to give Cadillacs as tips to bellhops, remember? I read that somewhere. Imagine being that, everybody just hanging on your word, anything you do is gold, anybody you want to see, you can see them. Wasn't there a story about Elvis, who got in to the see the President and he wanted to be an FBI agent, and they gave him a badge? Can you imagine that? Everybody else has got to go to law school first. But Elvis has got one. Can you imagine? Wouldn't that be the most phenomenal existence in the world? Obviously not, because Elvis killed himself. Well, somebody may want to argue with me about it, but when you keep dumping all these drugs in your body on top of alcohol, I would call that killing yourself. Why?

Or how about his female counterpart? Same time frame in America. Remember Marilyn Monroe? Same thing, like Elvis. Talk about having everything you would dream a human could want in life. Look at that body. Every man in the world chasing after her. You've got more money than you can even imagine counting. Everybody hangs on your words. You're going to interview Marilyn Monroe and people listen. And you'd think that would be the ultimate existence, right? Nope. She killed herself too. Why? Because, well, I would imagine that a person gets to that kind of a point and they've got everything externally that you could ever dream of having, and you look around and you say well, why does life still hurt? And you might just figure that's all there is, and you can't live with that knowledge, so you blow your brains out.

I find it interesting to read. It's those types that you hear about killing themselves. It's not the poor people. The cleaning lady who works at Elvis' place, she may have a homely body, she may have eight kids she's struggling to feed and no education, and every day is three jobs, but she's not going to kill herself. Why? Well, as tough as life is, it's got to only get better. So there's some hope there. But once you get to the top there's no hope.

This (water) is the opposite. What would this be in a perversion? Well, if we could take this so far away from centre where science becomes so oppressive that there's nothing left over here, it would be like the 'mad scientist', the kind who uses science actually against people. Horror stories we hear from Germany, during the war, where "Well, let's take some people. Let's take this twin and put this one here and this one over here and if we shoot this one, will this one suffer?" Bizarre stuff like that. I don't know whether it happened or not, but I heard these stories, where they cease to be people, where the science gathers such a momentum of its own that people are poisoning their own air and their own water for the sake of some kind of a technical advancement, a better plastic cereal bowl that doesn't break when you drop it on the floor. Meanwhile we have such things as Minamata in Japan, where people are paying a price for that.

Well, it sounds pretty awful, all these negative things. But there's a positive side. There's a scientist, there's an artist, there's a leader, there's a warrior, defender, server. These things are brought out in us; they work that way. Don't you love them? I mean, don't we love these types of characters in our culture? We make movies about all of these. See, there are characters that embody the best of each of these in movies. Earth characters. Who would be a cultural stereotype of that 'earth' leader, commander kind of a character? We might see him in movies or in our folklore. Mother Earth. If you talk about some friend of yours and say, "Oh, she's a real Mother Earth type", what do you think of? That kind of a person that everybody just sort of runs to because they feel good to be around, and they inspire confidence. With movies, there's an earth kind of film, there's an earth kind of way to move. These become quite popular with certain kinds of characters. Anything that Arnold Schwarzenegger plays in the movies. Kind of earth-like. Not a lot of scintillating dialogue there. He just shows up and he's that. Arnold Schwarzenegger fight scenes? I mean, the realistic ones, where he looks over at the camel who gets in his way and he punches it and it falls over? (laughter) That's earth, okay. Or earth type leaders who inspire us.

Water. Water heroes. Now these are science people. They know something and they're usually loners because, again, this isn't an in touch with people kind of a person. So water heroes would show up, and they'd be scientific but exciting. They've got to be exciting. So a water hero would be Indy Jones, where he's almost dead in every movie. In fact, you know he's dead, but somehow he's got some little trick. He can throw the air mattress out of the airplane and he just happens to fall on it just right and he knows the correct angle to go at it, and he knows that these pygmies use this kind of a poison on their spear so when you get shot here's the thing you take as the antidote. James Bond is another good one. James Bond always fights these incredible, impossible villains. They have iron teeth and they're going to grind him up like a garbage disposal and there's the guy with the iron hat - remember that? - where he's going to kill him. And he always has a tricky way out. He knows something.

And then fire. Fire heroes in the movies are these firey, surface, expressive kinds of people. Noisy, mile a minute kinds of people. Any kind of a Robin Williams movie or act has that kind of fire, just a mile a minute, out there all the time, funny, enjoyable, engaging. Those of you who are martial artists may have seen a Bruce Lee movie. He's almost a parody of this fire nature, right? He was so, so steamed up that he blew himself up by the time he was 32. Literally blew out the veins in the back of his head. A firey guy, and people love that in the theatres. They love that. Remember that slow burn, where he'd stand there and he'd look and his veins would start to pop out here, and then he'd let go of that high pitched screaming yell, and he'd fly at twenty people? Oh, we paid a lot of money to see him do that (laughter). It's so inspiring!

And then wind over here. Wind is kind of a defender. In its ultimate form of exaggeration, this wind wisdom over here is being at the right place at the right time, becomes all service, nothing there. It's a little hard to find some of these characters in movies because a lot of us don't identify well with the all-serving, no personality angle. So, they're kind of there, and we've seen a few of them. There's that Kung Fu TV show. Remember Kwai Chang, the monk? Good example of this, where there's absolutely nothing there. Harmless, unless you pushed him too far, and then he'd respond. And they'd always have the worst bad guys, remember that? Grizzled guys with broken off knives would be coming at him and this little monk would sort of carefully turn his body and slip the fool up, and take the knife out, and this guy would actually stab his own buddy over there. (laughter) Kwai Chang would move along. Wind hero.

In the middle circle, I haven't said too much about this. This is another kind of proclivity, but it's also the base on which all of these archetypes are kind of built, maybe you can say. So, as positive form, we would call this broadness of base, or maybe broadness of vision. And again that's a central archetype in all of us. That's what's going to summon up the rest of these heroes. Now there are a lot of faces here I haven't even talked about. Well, we've got the clock we're competing with. So this is an overview of how this works.

We start with a negative observation. And it's okay. That's the way I started my martial art. It also starts the same way with the whole teachings of Buddhism. In fact, some people who don't study Buddhism enough think, "Boy, that's a pessimistic religion, isn't it?" The first great law: All of life is going to be experienced as anguish. Oh god! (laughter) Let's just go get a drink. (laughter) I mean, let's just fix it up here. Gee, if that's the first law, I don't know if I'm ready for the second one. (laughter) Well, it's not pessimistic - it's what is. Without the right kind of viewpoint, everything you touch is going to be a letdown. See, the rest of the laws have to do with developing the right kind of viewpoint. Again, this is the universe; this is where I am. I can change the universe, if I don't like it, right? No, not too likely. Okay, well that didn't work. I could get another universe: I could go live in another universe. Many have tried, but we haven't gotten word back from them yet (laughter). The third option is I could change the way in which I relate to this stuff. That's where it begins. So it's not pessimistic - it's honest, it's realistic.

"My nature is to see things my way, this way right here." "Well, change." "Why?" "Because people don't like being around you." "Oh, okay, I think that what I'll try to do from now on is try to be kind of a light-weight, cheerful person." Right. You know how that works. It's not going to work; it's ingrained in me that I'm going to see life this way or I'm going to be this way. Okay, so if that's what is, and you're not going to change the universe, and you're not going to find another universe, and you're going to have to somehow change yourself, and you are recognizing that this is a proclivity, how are you going to do it? Are you going to negate that and pretend it doesn't exist? "I'll just think happy thoughts, and I'll be a more pleasant person." Or "I'll just think more serious thoughts and I'll be a more intellectual person." No. What I've got to do is take what I have, nurture that, bring it into a good focus to where it serves me and it works for me. And see, the neat thing is that every one of these are contiguous with this centre. It's my way home to getting to centre. It's my way in to the fullness of vision.

See, even fullness of vision has its negative application, too. If what we're talking about is broadness of vision and kind of a broad spiritual view of things, the negative view of that is getting lost in there. There is such a thing as being too broadminded. I can get kind of lost in there, where I just sort of see everything, and "I guess, that's just the way it's supposed to be." And the next thing you know, we're locked in there, so there isn't development at the centre. Now each one of these is called a particular kind of wisdom. And what I'm going to do is mention each one of these wisdoms. We don't have time to explain why they are. It's just here they are, and maybe you'll see some of the logic in that. And if you do have a few questions, we do have a little bit of time before we wrap up this evening.

If this is a wisdom, if we take this kind of proclivity of a human being here, and you say, well, what about broadmindedness, openmindedness and broadness of vision, if we were going to develop that to where it was a wisdom, what aspect of being wise would that be? And again, what is wisdom all about? I know something and I have an experience with it, and because I have experience I know more, and because I know more now I can have new experiences. So, it's that combination. Classically what this is called is all-pervading wisdom. So, broadness of time, space, kind of wisdom. Usually we associate this with old individuals, that have done and seen a lot and thought about it as they went through. Why? Because you've got to be old to have those experiences, and you've got to be smart to have thought about them and considered them. This wisdom, which is absolute knowledge of all that is, is hard for us to identify with. So, as a human being, maybe for tonight's lecture, we'll just talk about it from that point of view.

Broadness of vision. That's an aspect of wisdom, isn't it? If you were running your own company or your own university, or your own hospital or your own life, broadness of vision, what you want are the forms of wisdom that you want to have working for you. Down here, with water which is tossed and so forth, if you get that perfectly smooth to where you can see yourself in it, it's like a mirror. This is referred to as Dai-In Kyo-Chi - great round mirror wisdom. What that refers to is there's an aspect of wisdom that can recognize things for what they are. So like a mirror in the old days in ancient China and Japan, what they would do is they would have a disk of metal, polish it to where you could see a reflection. So a mirror was generally something only people who had some money and wherewithal would have. Not like today. You couldn't go to K-mart and buy a little twenty-nine cent mirror. And if a mirror dropped on the floor and got dented or bent a little bit, or if you didn't polish it enough, some of the oxidation would come through the metal and it would get a little foggy in there, or whatever. Well this is perfect mirror. We see things without bias. We see things in all their truth without bias. No warp, no fog, no filter. I see things as they are, so I have broadness of vision, the ability to see things as they are without bias. And again, think about our own life. Sometimes we may want to see things a certain way, with hope, say, but we're not acknowledging what is.

Another aspect of wisdom is the ability to see the value in everything. This is called equal value wisdom. Now this is a real stretch because sometimes there's going to be some things that come into life where we don't see the value. What's the value of that mosquito, sucking blood out of my arm here so I'm going to have to scratch that thing for the next five days? Well, we didn't say it was going to be easy. We just said that ultimately there is an explanation for that. Equal value. Well, how do you get that kind of wisdom? How do you discover that, from being a stuck in the mud kind of person? It's a long process; it involves ritual; it involves seeing yourself in a higher progression and so forth. We might say, as example, if I believed in this particular procedure, I believe this and I know this to be true, and you come in with a new idea and I immediately squelch that, why is it that this idea here is good and that one's bad? Well if you ask the person who felt that way, they'd probably tell you, "I know this works. I've done this one many times and I know it works. I don't know about that one." And what we might do is say, "Well yeah, but can you remember a time in your life when what you call right was different?" How about yourself, do you remember what was truth when you were twelve?

I can remember some things I really believed when I was twelve. And then when I was eighteen, people reminded me of what I used to say. "Ah, I'm so embarassed. Well, I was only twelve. Now I'm eighteen and I really know what's true here." And then I turn twenty-four, and oh god, people used to tell me stuff I said when I was eighteen, and I was embarassed. And then I was thirty-eight, and now I'm forty-two, and I've learned to kind of hedge my bets a little bit. Here's what's true for me right now, here's what I believe, and I also reserve the right to learn more as I go along.

So, we look at this and we say, okay, I see the value in this today but I didn't see the value in that yesterday. How about the future? Could it be that this indeed will be something that I will see as of value tomorrow? So there's a process. It's not just wishful thinking or affirmations or Tinker Bell putting fairy dust on you or praying to the Buddha or whatever. There's a process that we're going through in here. So this becomes the wisdom of seeing the value in everything. And, as we said, there's such a thing as being too openminded.

This kind of wisdom up here (fire), which starts out as being kind of a scattered, wild attitude toward life, can't get enough, can't get enough of anything, where I'm chasing after it and I'm all surface. From there, by studying it, living it, working with it and seeing it, we eventually come to a wisdom of discernment, of discretion, where I can tell one thing from another thing, and I don't mistake things.

And down here (wind), this last one, is the person who ran around doing all kinds of things, and what we end up doing here is developing the wisdom of all accomplishing action. And again, think about that as a piece of wisdom that you would want to have, knowing exactly what you need to do at any given time to get done specifically what you know needs to be done, based on all of these other aspects of wisdom.

Some of us will come to that wisdom by being servers in the world. We find our way home. Some of us are going to find that wisdom by being artists and expressing persons, and we find our way home. Some of us are going to be scientists, the scholars, the ones who go within, the philosophers, the magicians, and we find our way home. And others here are going to be the leaders, the ones who give form and guidance to things, and inspire and then reward the ones who serve that ideal, and we find our way home from there.

Well, covering the mandala in less than two hours is sort of like a four minute tour of Toronto. I don't live here, and you know all kinds of neat places that it would be great to go and see, but we're not going to do that because we don't have enough time. And it's the same with the mandalas. So, it's a real fast view of some of the things I've enjoyed learning and being able to find in my own life, based on being a guy that wanted to go in and study an ultimate form of not dying in a knife fight seventeen years ago when I first moved to Japan.

The transcript of this talk was submitted by J. Courtland Elliott. The second half of this article will appear in August. J. Courtland Elliott is one of those folks who have been around forever and still haven't figured it out. He started training with Stephen K. Hayes at the 1st Ninja Matsuri in 1981, and hasn't stopped evangelizing since. Currently holding back at Sandan (from SKH, Dr. Hatsumi, and having been offered it by Doron Navon), he is also well versed in other martial arts, most notably Jujutsu (Nidan from Harold Howard of UFC fame). He has recently become a WebHead and co-ordinates the Musashi Web for Travelers (www.io.org/~jcebujin/musashi.html), a resource for Martial Artists on the move. He can be reached at: jcebujin@io.org