# The Finger and the Moon

[^note]: **by Alan Watts**

There is an old christian phrase -- _Crux medicina mundi_ -- the Cross, the
medicine of the world -- a phrase which is rather remarkable in that it suggests
that religion is a medicine rather than a diet. The difference is, of course,
that medicine is something to be taken occasionally -- like penicillin --
whereas a diet is regular food. Perhaps this analogy cannot be pressed too far,
since there are medicines like insulin which some people have to take all the
time. But there is a point to the analogy -- a point expressed in another Latin
saying, not at all Christian, since its author was Lucretius: _Tantum religio
potuit suadere malorum_ (Too much religion is apt to encourage evil). I am not
thinking so much of the exploitation of the poor by a corrupt priesthood, or of
the obvious evils of zealotry and fanaticism. I am thinking, rather, of the old
Buddhist metaphor of the doctrine which is like a raft for crossing a river.
When you have reached the opposite shore, you do not carry the raft on your
back, but leave it behind.

There is something here which applies not only to the mere handful of people who
might be said to have reached the opposite shore, but to most of us. To carry
out the metaphor a little: if you are going to cross the river, you must make
haste, for if you dally on the raft, the current will carry you downstream, and
out to the ocean -- and then you will be stuck on the raft forever. And it is so
easy to get stuck -- on the raft, on religion, on psychotherapy, on philosophy.
To use another Buddhist simile: The doctrine is like a finger pointing at the
moon, and one must take care not to mistake the finger for the moon. Too many of
us, I fear, suck the pointing finger of religion for comfort, instead of looking
where it points.

Now it seems to me that what the finger of religion points at is something not
at all religious. Religion, with all its apparatus of ideas and practices, is
altogether a pointing -- and it does not point at itself. It doesn’t point at
God, either, for the notion of God is part and parcel of religion. I might say
that what religion points at is reality, except that this merely puts a
philosophical notion in place of a religious one. And I can think of a dozen
other substitutes for God or reality. I could say that it points at one’s true
Self, at the eternal Now, at the nonverbal world, at the infinite and ineffable
-- but really none of this is very helpful. It’s just putting one finger in
place of another. When Joshu asked his teacher Nansen, "What is the Tao, the
Way?" Nansen replied, "Your everyday mind is the Tao."

But this doesn’t help, either, for as soon as I try to understand what is meant
by my everyday mind, and then try to latch on to it, I am just sucking another
finger. But why does this difficulty arise? If someone actually points his
finger at the moon, I have no difficulty in turning and looking at the moon. But
the thing at which these religious and philosophical fingers are pointing seems
to be invisible, so that when I turn to look there is nothing there, and I am
forced to go back to the finger to see whether I understood its direction
correctly. And sure enough, I find time and time again that I made no mistake
about its direction -- but for all this I simply cannot see what it’s pointing
at.

All this is equally exasperating for the person who is doing the pointing, for
he wants to show me something which, to him, is so obvious that one would think
any fool could see it. He must feel as we all feel when trying to explain to a
thick-headed child that two times zero is zero and not two, or some other
perfectly simple little fact. And there is something even more exasperating than
this. I am sure that many of you may, for a fleeting moment, have had one clear
glimpse of what the finger was pointing at -- a glimpse in which you shared the
pointer’s astonishment that you had never seen it before, in which you saw the
whole thing so plainly that you knew you could never forget it... and then you
lost it. After this, there may be a tormenting nostalgia that goes on for years.
How to find the way back, back to the door in the wall that no longer seems to
be there, back to the turning which led into paradise -- which wasn’t on the
map, which you saw for sure right here. But now there is nothing. It is like
trying to trace someone with whom you fell in love at first sight, and then lost
touch; and you go back to the original place of meeting again and again, trying
in vain to pick up the threads.

If I may put it in a way which is horribly cumbersome and inadequate, that
fleeting glimpse is the perception that, suddenly, some very ordinary moment of
your ordinary everyday life, lived by your very ordinary self, just as it is and
just as you are -- that this immediate here-and-now is perfect and
self-sufficient beyond any possibility of description. You know that there is
nothing to desire or seek for -- that no techniques, no spiritual apparatus of
belief or discipline is necessary, no system of philosophy or religion. The goal
is here. It is this present experience, just as it is. That, obviously, is what
the finger was pointing at. But the next moment, as you look again, the instant
in which you are living is as ordinary as ever, though the finger still points
right at it.

However, this irritatingly elusive quality of the vision to which the finger
points has an extremely simple explanation, an explanation which has to do with
what I said at the beginning about getting rid of the raft when you have crossed
the river, about taking religion as a medicine but not as a diet. For purposes
of understanding this point, we must take the raft as representing the ideas or
words or other symbols whereby a religion or a philosophy expresses itself,
whereby it points at the moon of reality. As soon as you have understood the
words in their plain and straightforward sense, you have already used the raft.
You have reached the opposite bank of the river. All that remains now is to do
what the words say -- to drop the raft and go walking on the dry land. And to do
this, you must drop the raft. In other words, you cannot, at this stage, think
about religion and practice it at the same time. To see the moon, you must
forget the pointing finger, and simply look at the moon.

This is why all the great Asian philosophies begin with the practice of
concentration, that is, of attentive looking. It is as if to say, "If you want
to know what reality is, you must look directly at it and see for yourself. But
this needs a certain kind of concentration, because reality is not symbols, it
is not words and thoughts, it is not reflections and fantasies. Therefore to see
it clearly, your mind must be free from wandering words and from the floating
fantasies of memory." To this we are probably apt to reply, "Fine, but this is
easier said than done." There always seems to be a problem about translating
words into action, and this problem seems to be peculiarly acute when it comes
to the so-called spiritual life. Faced with this problem, we back up and start
to busy ourselves with a lot of discussion about methods, techniques, and other
aids to concentration. But it should be simple enough to see that this is
nothing but procrastination and postponement. You cannot, at the same time,
concentrate and think about concentrating. It sounds almost silly to say it, but
the only way to concentrate is to concentrate. In actually doing it, the idea of
doing it disappears -- and this is the same thing as saying that religion
disappears when it becomes real and effective.

Now a great deal of the talk about the difficulty of action, or the difficulty
of concentration, is sheer nonsense. If we are sitting down together at a meal,
and I say to you, "Please pass the salt" -- you just do it, and there is no
difficulty about it. You do not stop to consider the right method. You do not
trouble yourself with the problem of how, when you have picked the saltshaker
up, you are going to be able to concentrate on it long enough to bring it to my
end of the table. Now there is absolutely no difference between this and
concentrating the mind’s attention to see into the nature of reality. If you can
concentrate the mind for two seconds, you can do it for two minutes, and if you
can do it for two minutes, you can do it for two hours. Of course, if you want
to _make_ this kind of thing horribly difficult, you begin to think about timing
yourself. Instead of concentrating, you begin to think about whether you are
concentrating, about how long you have concentrated, and about how much longer
you are going to keep it up. All this is totally off the point. Concentrate for
one second. If, at the end of this time, your mind has wandered off, concentrate
for another second, and then another. Nobody ever has to concentrate for more
than one second -- this one. This is why it is quite literally off the point to
time yourself, to compete with yourself, and to bother about your progress and
success in the art. It’s simply the old story of making a difficult job easy by
taking it one step at a time.

There is, perhaps, another difficulty -- and this is that in the state of
concentration, of clear unwavering attention, one has no self -- that is, no
self-consciousness. This is because the so-called self is a construct of words
and memories, of fantasies which have no existence in immediate reality. The
block or stoppage which so many of us feel between words and action, between
symbol and reality is actually a case of wanting to have one’s cake and eat it.
We want to enjoy _ourselves_, and fear that if we forget ourselves there will be
no enjoyment -- an entertainment without anyone present to be entertained. This
is why self-consciousness is a constant inhibition of creative action, a kind of
chronic self-frustration, such that civilizations which suffer from an overdose
of it go raving mad, invent atom bombs and blow themselves up.
Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after
every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of
the loss of rhythm.

This is all really a case of our own proverb, "a watched pot never boils." For
if you try to watch your mind concentrate, it will not concentrate. And if, when
it is concentrated, you begin to watch for the arrival of some insight into
reality, you have stopped concentrating. Real concentration is therefore a
rather curious and seemingly paradoxical state, since it is at once the maximum
of consciousness and the minimum of ego-feeling, which somewhat gives the lie to
those systems of Western psychology which identify the conscious principle with
the ego. Similarly, it is the maximum of mental activity or efficiency, and the
minimum of mental purposiveness, since one cannot simultaneously concentrate and
expect a result from concentration.

The only way to enter into this state is precipitately -- without delay or
hesitation, just to do it. This is why I ordinarily avoid discussion of all the
various kinds of Asian meditation techniques, such as Yoga. For I am inclined to
feel that for most Westerners, these are not aids but obstacles to
concentration. It is not unaffected and natural for us to assume the lotus
posture and go through all sorts of spiritual gymnastics. So many Westerners who
do this kind of thing are so self-conscious about it, so preoccupied with the
idea of doing it that they never really do it at all. For the same reason, I am
rather leery of too much Zen -- especially when it means importing all the
purely incidental apparatus of Zen from Japan, all the strictly technical
formalities, and all the endless and pointless discussion about who has or
hasn’t attained satori, or about how many koans one has solved, or how many
hours a day one sits in zazen, or meditation. This sort of thing is not Zen or
Yoga; it is just a fad, just religiosity, and is precisely self-consciousness
and affectation rather than unselfconsciousness and naturalness. If, however,
you can really do the thing itself -- that is, if you can learn to wake up and
concentrate at the drop of a hat -- you can take or leave the trimmings as you
will. For the fear of exoticism should not prevent us from enjoying the really
beautiful things which Asian culture has to offer -- Chinese painting, Japanese
architecture, Indian philosophy, and all the rest. But the point is that we
cannot really enter into the spirit of these things at all unless, in the first
place, we can acquire the special kind of relaxed concentration and
clear-sightedness which is essential for their proper appreciation.

Of themselves, they will not give us that capacity -- which is something innate.
If you have to import it from Asia, you do not have it at all. Therefore, the
important thing is simply to begin -- anywhere, wherever you are. If you happen
to be sitting, just sit. If you are smoking a pipe, just smoke it. If you are
thinking out a problem, just think. But don’t think and reflect unnecessarily,
compulsively, from sheer force of nervous habit. In Zen, they call this having a
leaky mind -- like an old barrel with open seams which cannot contain itself.

Well, I think this is enough medicine for tonight. So let’s put the bottle away,
and go out and look at the moon.

[^note]: _April 17, 1955_