You are caught in technique

However expert you are in the technique, you’re caught in it. This is very important. This is where the judo technique begins to shade into the Zen background. It’s a fractional application of Zen. You may become expert in technique, but there has got to be something beyond the technique. You may master a particular technique, then you try to force it. But, if your technique is this shape (like a circle) and the opportunity says, “A triangle,” and you’re trying to force something round into a triangle, it’s quite difficult. You have to be able to adapt.

You think, “No, this is my strong point. This is what I’m going to do. This is my strong point. I’ve spent years mastering this.” Very often, you can force it, but it’s not the true way. In the same way in life, we perfect certain techniques, and we rely on those, and we try to force them in all the situations. We try. We’re determined to use that. One man said, “I always look at things from a scientific point, always.” Or somebody else says, “The main thing is to be kind, simply to be kind. If a diabetic wants a drink, okay, drink.” We’re very good at it, and it’s impressive. It impresses us most of all, but it doesn’t adapt to the circumstances at all. How are we going to go beyond that?

Yukawa, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner says, when he was a boy, he was a genius at mathematics. But he was failed in class, because he was given a problem to solve and he solved it, but not by the method the class had been taught. The teacher marked it wrong. You’ve got to solve it by the method you’ve been taught, not by a perfectly correct method that you haven’t been taught. He said that was quite a little lesson to him that helped him later on when he was coming up for his Nobel Prize: the mindless hostility of people to new ideas.

There are formal confirmations based on formal achievements. They’re just external things. I wear a [judo belt]. Now it’s just a sentiment. I don’t do judo, but these belts are what you train in. You work through a few of them in your life, but they almost fall into the shape of a knot. They’ve been knotted so many times and they’re worn away. It holds the cloth very satisfactorily. It stops it slipping, so we wear this. It fits around you and the knot almost knots itself. It’s very comfortable. You get this when you’re about 19. However high you go, you can still wear this. That’s what most of us, we still like to do, but there’s something else which you can get, and I’ll show you. I’ve got a magnificent formal one. Very few people are entitled to wear this, but it’s very awkward. It’s so stiff that the knots simply don’t hold. It comes undone, almost at once. It’s terribly inconvenient, but it’s somehow an honour.

I never wear them. Periodically, I’m given a new one in the hope that the ‘old boy’ will be fascinated by the new belt and will come and wear it, but I never do. This sort of thing, it adds nothing to you. Same as you were before, the same weaknesses, the same strengths, exactly the same, but it’s a sort of external gloss that’s put on things. People think that when you get this you become better, but you don’t. As a matter of fact, you can’t get it until you’re well on in years, so it’s more or less a sign that you’ve got worse.

One masters the forms, but the forms don’t fit the opportunities exactly. A computer is very good at playing chess. It can calculate very well, but it doesn’t understand. The computer doesn’t understand what’s going on, the strategy. I have a chess computer, a German one here, which I can control by greed and fear. Offer him a pawn, and he looks at it and he thinks – you can press a button to know what he’s thinking. Sometimes he thinks incredible things, but if the pawn is there and he can take it and he sees there’s going to be no disaster, he takes it. Then the counter-attack comes, you see, and he goes, “Aha-ha-ha,” like this. You can control him that way and win.

This last time in Japan, a couple of months, three months ago, I faced a big computer they have at the chess centre there, the head centre of the Chess Association. This is Japanese chess and it’s a Japanese computer. A computer playing chess is almost as odd as a foreigner playing chess, so they thought, “We’ll put the two weirdoes on together.” I saw this thing. It was a Japanese thing. I’m used to a Western one, but then I thought, “No, it’s not a question of Japanese or Western. He’s a computer, and that means he’s a materialist,” so I played him the same way: greed, tempt him and he comes, then fear. He goes into a spasm, and then you can mate him. It’s very satisfactory.

Then, suddenly, you think, “Am I like that? Is something manipulating me by greed and fear? Can I be predicted, as I can predict and control the computer?” That makes us rather thoughtful. In the end, we have to give up the reliance on our special excellence, our special virtues.

In judo it’s a very, very difficult thing to do, to go into a contest without thinking, “Now I’ll win with this with all sort of… It’s very difficult to discard that. You feel, “I am a bull with horns. Now I’m cutting the horns off. What am I going to do?”

Titles in this series are:

Part 1: Collected Stories

Part 2: Egoism or Pride

Part 3: Christianity was put down in Japan

Part 4: Fifty-two stages of Buddhism

Part 5: You are caught in technique

Part 6: I have nothing

Part 7: Advance in emptiness