Letting Go - Alan Watts

It has been well said that Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export. You see, Hinduism is a way of life that goes far, far beyond what we in the West call religion. It involves cookery, everyday family life, house building, just everything. It's the whole Hindu way of life. And so you can't export it, just as you can't export Shinto from Japan. It belongs to the soil and the culture. But there are essential elements in it that can be transmitted outside the culture of India, and Buddhism was one of the ways of doing just that. So one might say simply this, to try and sum up what Buddhism is about. The word Buddha is derived from the root budh in Sanskrit, which means to be awake. So the Buddha is the awakened man, the man who woke up. What does he wake up from? Obviously a dream. And what kind of a dream is this? Well, I would call it a state of hypnosis. And this state of hypnosis, although I'm using hypnosis in a rather archaic sense of the word, is a state of being entranced, spellbound, fascinated. And this is called in Sanskrit avidya. Vidya is knowledge in Sanskrit, and it is the root from which we get videre in Latin, to see, and so vision in English. So putting the a in front of it means none. Not seeing. Ignorance. Ignorance where you see but you ignore everything that you're not looking at. When you put the beak of a chicken on a white chalk line, and the chicken is fascinated with that and can't get away from the chalk line, that's avidya. So in the same way our beaks were put on a chalk line when we were hypnotized into the notion of attending to life by conscious attention alone, by the spotlight to the exclusion of the floodlight. And so we began to imagine that we were separate individuals, what is called in Buddhism the view of separateness. And a Buddha is one who has overcome that. He is awakened from that illusion, from that state of hypnosis. And he knows, well, I can't put what he knows in any positive terms. This is the special thing about Buddhism. Everything in Buddhism sounds negative. Let's put it this way. Let's suppose you engage yourself in a relationship with the Buddha, or with one. I mean there are hundreds of Buddhas. One we call Gautama is just the historical Buddha that everybody knows about. But one Buddha leads to another, because as a result of his relationships with people he turns them into Buddhas too, awakened people. Now you meet one of these people, and he's going to give you a rough time. One of the Buddhas running around these days is Krishnamurti, and Krishnamurti absolutely destroys everybody's religion. Why do you believe this? Why are you hanging on to that? Why do you want to insist that this idea is so? And he shows you that all your fixed formulations, all the ideas to which you cling, are spurious. And then you suddenly get into a kind of vertigo, dizziness, that you feel suddenly that you're no longer standing on the firm ground, but that the universe has suddenly turned into water, or worse, air, or worse still, empty space. There's nothing to hold on to. Now you see, often when one discusses religion with people, they say, well, I need a religion because I need something to hold on to. Well, that's the way not to use a religion. Because if you use religion as something to hold on to, your religion is an expression of unfaith. Faith is where you let go, not where you hold on. When the cat falls off the tree, the cat relaxes, and so the cat lands with a soft thud and doesn't get hurt, because the cat has faith. But if the cat in midair were suddenly to grab itself with all four feet and tighten up, it'd be hurt. And that's what people do when they say, "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee." They want something to hold on to. And that is unfaith. So the method of Buddhism, it's called the Dharma, doesn't mean the law, it means the method. The method is to knock the stuffing out of you, to take away everything to which you cling, to cleanse you completely of all beliefs, all ideas, all concepts of what life is about, so that you are completely let go. So Buddhism has no doctrines at all that you have to believe in. I don't care what background you come from, whether you're a Roman Catholic at one extreme or a logical positivist at the other. Both are clinging to something. And so the method of Buddhism is to knock out the underpinnings and say, well, we just, not only do we not believe in anything, we don't even believe in not believing in anything. You know, you crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after you. But in this case you do the exact opposite of that. That's a defensive move, to crawl into a hole. In this way you crawl into great space and then pull the space out after you. And to go through this is pretty rough. Because you can do it on what seems at first to be a merely intellectual level. So you can engage a group of people in discussion, and whenever they propose an idea that is their guiding principle of life, you demolish it, show that it doesn't hold water, and step by step you unearth by talking with them what are the fundamental ideas they're operating on. Everybody is a philosopher. Everybody has metaphysics, although they may not know what it is. They've never examined it. But by this method you bring it out and you demolish it. And suddenly what seemed like a very nice intellectual discussion turns into sheer murder. People get really anxious. They develop all the trembles and the symptoms of extreme anxiety. And so they finally say to the guru, the teacher, well heaven's sakes, what do you believe in? He says, I'm not proposing anything. I didn't set anything up. Well, how do you navigate? How do you exist? This is what's the problem. Because what we're moving from is a state of affairs where we're accustomed to navigation on land, to a state of affairs where we're in the water. And this is very critical for today. Because the impact of modern science on Western culture has been very similar to this. In Christianity we sing hymns like "How Firm a Foundation" and "Rock of Ages," "Ein feste Burg," "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," we've something to stand on, "The Church's One Foundation Is Jesus Christ Her Lord," and it's this firm thing. All right, suddenly all that disappears or becomes implausible, and we find ourselves swimming, or sinking. Now when you find that you're living in the midst of the universe of relativity, well, there's nothing you could hold on to. You've got to learn how to swim. And to swim you've got to relax and stop grabbing. So this is what Buddhism does when it says it's the art of letting go, of non-attachment. Non-attachment doesn't mean that you lose your appetite for dinner. It means simply that you stop grabbing. You get rid of stickiness, stickiness in the sense that, for example, when a wheel has an axle that's too tight and it sticks, you want to loosen it up a bit. You don't want it too loose, you don't want it floppy, like a lot of people when you tell them to relax, they become like a limp rag. That's not relaxing. Relaxing is having still tone. It's a certain, it's a middle way. So this is entirely what Buddhism is about. It's about learning, if I may put it in a vivid way, when you were born you were kicked off a precipice, and there's nothing that can stop you falling. And although there are a lot of rocks falling with you, with trees growing on them and all sorts of things like that, you can cling to one of those rocks if you like, as it goes down with you, for safety. But it's not safe. Nothing is safe. Everything is falling apart. Everything is in a state of change. There's no way of stopping it. And when you are really resigned to that, and when you really accept that, then there's nothing left to be afraid of. And when there's nothing left to be afraid of and you've given everything up, you know that, even, a lot of people cling to suffering, because they know they are right as long as they hurt. "Oh, I bless the good Lord for my boils, for my mental and bodily pains, for without them my faith all congeals, and I'm doomed to hell's near-ending flames." A lot of people know that they're right so long as they suffer. But that's an illusion too. Even suffering offers no security. Even suicide offers no security in Buddhism. There is no security at all. You simply have to face this fact that everything is in flux, and go, go, go, go with it. The question then is simply how to convince people of this, if anybody wants to be convinced. You know, it's not the sort of thing you shove down people's throats. You don't convert them to this, because if they don't want to be converted they won't let go. So Buddhism therefore involves a very special relationship between the questioner and the person to whom the question is addressed, the pupil and the teacher. And now then, Buddhism came to China as early as 60 A.D., but didn't at that time make a very great impression. It was not until about the year 400 a very great Sanskrit scholar by the name of Kumarajiva came and started teaching Chinese scholars Sanskrit. And they worked with him to translate Sanskrit into Chinese, and they translated the Buddhist scriptures. They didn't of course do them all at that time, because the Buddhist scriptures occupy as much space as the Encyclopedia Britannica, in fact a little more. The Indians are great talkers. Well anyway, they found that when they translate this into Chinese, you had to find equivalent Chinese words for the Sanskrit ideas, and they found these from the Taoist philosophy. So slowly then Indian attitudes began to be modified by Chinese attitudes, because the Chinese read into these translations Taoist meanings. So things got a little altered. Now here came the alteration that is crucial. First of all, in Indian Buddhism there's very little humor. But Chinese life is full of humor. The greatest philosopher of China, Zhuangzi, is the only philosopher, I think in the whole world, who is profoundly humorous. There's a book in the Modern Library, published by Random House, called The Wisdom of Laotse, translated by Lin Yutang, and he includes along with the translation of Laotse huge sections of Zhuangzi. And this is absolutely fascinating because of the humor of it. Indian Buddhism had very little humor, some yes, but very little. Next, it was all tied up with celibacy, which to the Chinese was absolutely incomprehensible. Chinese civilization is rigged around the family to a far greater extent than ours is, which is saying something. They just couldn't see any point or any wisdom in celibacy. When Buddhism came to China it still retained a certain element of celibacy, but for different reasons than Hindu. The Chinese way of celibacy is not that sex is naughty, but it's terribly convenient not to have a wife. In other words, the ideal of the uninvolved life has a certain appeal. But they could never get through into their heads the notion that sexual desire was bad, which has always played a fairly strong role in Hindu thinking. Not in the same way as it has in the West, they don't have, the Hindus don't have a guilt take on it, but they think that it dissipates your spiritual energies. And you see, in yoga they envisage the idea that at the base of the spine there is what is called the kundalini, the serpent power, or the force of psychic energy. And so long as it remains at the base of the spine, this force is dissipated in sexuality. Now yoga is to suck this thing up the spine and get it into the head, and so then you withdraw from the manifestation of this energy or the dissipation of it in sexuality, and it's put on a higher level. Only, which end is up. You can do it the other way too, they have what's called the right-hand way of doing it and the left-hand way of doing it. I'm not going to go into that now. The Chinese didn't see it that way. They couldn't see that it was a dissipation of energy. So what they wanted to aim at was a way of living Buddhism and being awake, but at the same time remaining active in the ordinary life of the world. It's what's called in their phraseology being king on the outside and the sage on the inside. Managing practical affairs, completely involved in whatever life is, but at the same time inwardly living on top of the mountain, being cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown. So Chinese Zen is the preeminent expression of this, because it is the mixture of Indian Buddhism and Chinese Taoism plus a certain Confucian practicality. Zen developed out of the work of Kumarajiva, came into China, as I said, around 400 or a little before. He had two disciples who began to work on Buddhism from a Taoist point of view, and they were actually the originators of Zen. Then apparently shortly before 500, as the dates now check out, another Indian came to China whose name was Bodhidharma. And Bodhidharma was the person who touched off Zen as a specific movement. Bodhidharma had a pupil by the name of, in Chinese, Hui-k'o, Eka in Japanese pronunciation. Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese Chan. The story is that when Eka came to Bodhidharma, Bodhidharma refused to accept him as a student. All Zen masters do this. They reject you. And this stimulates you to come back stronger. If you're going to learn at all. And Eka came back stronger and stronger and stronger, and Bodhidharma resisted him stronger and stronger, and finally he cut off his left arm and presented it to Bodhidharma and said, look, here's my left arm given to you as a token that nothing in the world matters to me except to find out what you're all about. All right, he said, what do you want to know? Eka said, I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind. Mind is this word pronounced shin. And shin is here. Shin is the heart-mind, it's the psychic center. Bodhidharma said, bring out your shin here before me and I will pacify it. Eka said, when I look for it I can't find it. Bodhidharma said, then it's pacified. And Eka immediately understood what the whole thing was about. That's the experience called satori in Japanese, wu in Chinese. It's just what we call in our modern psychological jargon the aha phenomenon. The aha phenomenon. Now I see. Well now, what was all this Zen? Zen is a translation of the Sanskrit word dhyana, being pronounced chan in Chinese and zen in Japanese, and is unfortunately untranslatable in English. It designates a certain state of consciousness that is sometimes called meditation, but that won't do at all. Contemplation isn't really the point, the Chinese have a different word for contemplation. Sometimes, one-pointedness of mind. I would prefer to translate this word with the notion of total presence of mind. When we say a person is crazy we often say they're not all there. Now go to the opposite of that and visualize the person who is completely there, or who is completely here. A person who lives totally and absolutely now. That doesn't mean he's incapable of thinking about the past or the future, because thoughts about the past and about the future are included in the present. You have them now. But imagine the kind of person who is not distracted, who when he talks to you really gives you his whole being, who doesn't, as it were, look over your shoulder and wander after something else. Somebody who, first of all, he's completely here, and he's so much here that you can't phase him. Now this idea of phasing is crucial in Zen. I referred a moment ago to attachment, that Buddhism is living free from attachments. And I made the point that this is not abandoning a good appetite for dinner, but it's stopping sticking. In psychological jargon, you don't block, a mind of no hesitation. It's sometimes called in Chinese the phrase mojo is used, of going straight ahead. So supposing somebody walks up to you on the street and says, are you saved? Now most of us who are intelligent people feel embarrassed by such a question. What's this wretched Salvation Army person or Jehovah's Witness doing asking me whether I'm saved or not? And we're all a little bit, you know, what do you do with a nut like that. But as in Zen, this is a perfect moment to respond, to the most embarrassing question, are you saved? But Zen comes back in a very funny way. In Zen one doesn't give philosophical answers to a question like that, you give practical answers. I had a boiled egg this morning. Whenever you are asked about matters sacred, theoretical, and philosophical, you answer in terms of things earthy and practical. But then on the other hand, when you are asked about things earthy and practical, you answer in terms of things religious and philosophical. Is dinner ready? Who's asking this question? Who are you? This is the flavor of Zen. You know, Bodhidharma is supposed to have meditated so long that his legs fell off, and he's usually drawn this way. It looks like a shmoo, but in Japan you buy these toys that are darumas, and they are so weighted in here that you can never knock them over. You can bat it on the floor, bat it this way, bat it that way, but it always comes up again. And so the poem says, seven times down, eight times up, such is life. This is the principle of not being phased, not being attached. So to play the game, you can't phase me. This is very important in the art of lifemanship, fundamental gamesmanship. Because, you see, when the Zen monks moved into Kyoto, they took over the best part of town. Simply fantastic how this happened. The beautiful hills were occupied by the brigands who later became the Japanese nobility, the great daimyos. These were the toughest characters. And these Zen monks played a game with them, which was that, you know, you possess all these lands and you were powerful and so on, but so what, it's all falling apart. Then what will you do? Well, they said, that's too bad, we don't know. And the Zen monk said, oh, you haven't got the hang of the thing. So they found that they couldn't terrify their monks. They played all sorts of tricks, but the Zen monks were better masters at it. Supposing you say to somebody, I'm not afraid of you, you can do anything you like, you can kill me or anything at all. But if I go and kill the fellow who says this, I'll never find out whether he was afraid or not. So they outfaced these people and said, we have a secret that you don't have, and we'll teach your servitors to be great warriors, because they'll learn the secret too and they won't be afraid of anything. This is what they did. And so the daimyos, the noblemen, built great monasteries for these Zen masters and monks on their best land. The finest artists of Japan made gold leaf screens for almost every room in the place. And although nobody owns anything individually, the community owns it collectively, with the protection of the daimyos, and they had a tremendous scene going. Now to us that sounds extremely weird, even immoral. You don't expect religious people to do things like that. No, I know you don't, if the religious people are self-righteous and have no humor. But these people didn't go around pretending that they were especially good. They didn't dupe themselves. They were people who understood what human nature is, that in every one of us there is an element of irreducible rascality. In Jewish theology this is called the yetzer hara, the element of irreducible rascality which was created by God, because God has one too. And that's why, when you are really affectionate with somebody else, when for example men, I don't know what women do in their private lives between each other, but men, as we all know, say to someone they're very fond of, "why you old bastard," just like that. There's a certain way of saying to a person, there's a certain glint of recognition. And so there's a Zen poem which says, when two Zen masters meet each other on the road, they need no introduction. When a thief meets a thief, they recognize each other instantly. And this goes back, you see, again into the heart of Chinese philosophy. Human nature is considered to be basically good, and even the rascally elements of it are the salt in the human stew. There has to be this little thing, that human passions and the natural contentiousness and greed or whatever that we have, is an essential element in our makeup. And that when people lose sight of that, they go mad. Nothing, for example, is more dangerous than a saint. Let us say an unconscious saint who thinks that he is right, and who endeavors to live an absolutely pure life and to eliminate all selfish thoughts. Somebody who undertakes that task is going to be a menace to all around, because he loses his humor. He loses his real humility, which is knowing that, after all, since we're human, we have certain needs. We need to eat, we need sex, we need this, that, and the other, and this sort of has a quality of humor to it. And so this is why in Zen art, the sages are always drawn to look a little bit like bums. You know that Pu-tai, or Hotei as he's called, what's called the laughing Buddha, the fat Buddha with an immense belly, and carrying around an enormous bag of rubbish into which he indiscriminately puts anything he finds around, and then gives it away to children. This is the sort of type which the Chinese call the old rogue. And the old rogue as a type of this poet-sage-monk-and-scholar is greatly admired. He's the nonviolent brigade, the rolling stone, the free man, or in our words, the joker. The joker, you see, is the card that can play any role in the pack. So Zen then developed in China after Bodhidharma's time and came to a sort of golden age in the Tang and Song dynasties. The golden age of Zen lies between 713 and approximately 1100 to 1200. That's the great creative period in which all the marvelous masters emerged, and during which a profound influence on the development of Chinese poetry and painting, calligraphy, and scholarship. Then between 1100 and 1200 it shifted to Japan and underwent a new development, rather different in quality and in tone. And after it had done that, for some curious reason, but it's a very complicated historical question, it slowly faded away in China, so that as we find it today it is principally a Japanese phenomenon. And it is slowly fading in Japan and slowly growing in the West. It's a very funny thing. Now then, let me indicate what Zen training, what its method is, how does it work. I said before, what is involved is a dialogue, an interchange between two people, one who's defined himself as a student and has therefore defined the other as the teacher. There is no teacher until a student arrives. No problem until a question is raised. So students create teachers. If you ask a question, you get thirty blows with a stick. If you don't ask a question, you get thirty blows with a stick. Because you simply, you put yourself in statu, you've defined yourself as having a problem. Now nobody really has a problem. But the maya, the game of life, is to pretend that you do. Back to fundamental Hinduism. The godhead, or the Self, pretends it's all of us, and so gets lost, and so has a ball, and dreams all this going on. So when you're on your way out from the dream, it suddenly occurs to you that you have a problem. Life is suffering. You would like to get out of this. One such student went to a Zen master and he said, we have to dress and eat every day, and how do we get out of all that? In other words, you might ask the question in this way, we have to work, get up Monday morning, go to the office, do all this routine, sell something and so on, how do we get out of the rat race? So we have to dress and eat every day, and how do we get rid of all that? And the master said, we dress, we eat. The student said, I don't understand. He replied, if you don't understand, put on your clothes and eat your food. This is the kind of dialogue so characteristic of Zen. So the position is this. The master, on being approached by a student about the problem of life, says, I have nothing to teach you. I am a Zen master, I have nothing to say. Zen is not words. And furthermore, everything is perfectly clear. There was a Confucian scholar who went to a Zen master and said, what is your secret teaching? And he replied, there is a saying in your own teacher Confucius which explains it all. Don't you remember when Confucius said to his disciples, do you suppose that I'm concealing something from you? I've held nothing back. And the scholar didn't get this. So a few days later they were walking together in the mountains, and they passed the wild laurel bush, and the Zen master said to the Confucian scholar, do you smell it? He said, yes. He said, you see, I'm holding nothing back. So the position of the Zen master is, there is nothing to tell you. We're not offering you any panacea, any solution, any doctrine, any big goodie, to the problem of life. The problem is an illusion. Well then the student under these circumstances thinks, well, this is some sort of a come-on. He's testing my sincerity. And of course the nothing which he has to teach is the mystery of the great void. He does not take it as meaning just plain old ordinary nothing, but the great void. And so he persists. And the teacher makes him persist until he gets way out on a limb. He has to persist so much that he practically dedicates his life, saying, just as the way Eka symbolically cut off his arm, the student is put in the position of dedicating his life to solving this thing and getting what that teacher has. And of course there wasn't anything all along. But he's been put in that position. So then, once he's in statu pupillari, once he becomes a student, he's put through all kinds of hoops. They make him learn to meditate, to sit cross-legged, practice zazen. And then they also add to the trouble by asking impossible questions, which are called koan. And these questions are palpably absurd. What they are saying essentially, at least the elementary koans are all concerned with this, are requests for behavior on the part of the student that will be perfectly genuine. Show me who you are. Now wait a minute, I don't want to see any social definition of you. I don't want to know your name, your address, who your parents were. I want to see the absolutely authentic you. It's like existentialists talk about authentic being. Or it might be in the same way a confessor, a father confessor in a Christian sense, could say, give me a really good confession. What is the bad thing you've really done? And you confess to him adulteries and murders and thefts and sacrilege and blasphemies and cussing and so on, and he says, oh no, no, no, no, no, come on, those are only trivial things, come on now, what is the really awful thing you've done? I don't know, what, me? This is the backwards way of doing exactly the same thing as the Zen master is doing, saying, who are you really? Are you anybody? Is anybody home? Have you got anything? And what they do, they do things like making you shout. This word is very important in Zen, the word nothing, mu. It's represented by the empty circle, the word mu in Japanese. So they say, now say it, say mu. Mu, you know, with all your guts going into it. They say, no, no, you don't know how to say that, come on, that's feeble, that's nothing, let's really say it. They have every kind of trick like that, to show you that the more you make an effort to be genuine, the more of a fool you become. And they tie you up in knots until you're desperate. There was an American Zen student who was on a Fulbright, and was given a year to study there. And he started to panic because he had only a month to go and he hadn't realized it. And he knew he had to, and he went to the center and said, damn it, he said, look, I've only got a month left. The master said, all right, we'll have what we call a sesshin. Sesshin is an intense meditation practice where you only sleep three hours a night sort of thing, and you meditate all the rest of the time. Let's go, let's really do it, do it, do it, do it, and every day three times you come to me and present the answer to your Zen problem, your koan. And it got worse and it got worse and it got worse, and he got more and more desperate, that here was this Fulbright going to end and he wouldn't know what Zen was all about. Well, practically on the last day, he suddenly saw there was nothing to see. It's all right the way it is. And this tremendous illumination, a load off his head, was of course what the master was trying to make him do. And now, in the ordinary way, if you're not on a Fulbright and you can stay around further in, the master will then play a trick on you. He'll say, now that's wonderful, you got your foot in at the gate, you saw, you realized there's nothing to realize, you realized the void, there's nothing to cling to, you see that there are no barriers, no blocks in any direction, it's all transparent. But that is just the beginning. It's all a necessity now for you to discipline yourself much harder, to make great efforts, really to get through. What are you going to do about that? The student may say, well, I don't know, I've had enough, I think I've realized what it's all about. And he goes away. Sometime later he begins to worry, because, you see, the great emotional relief of this insight begins to wear off, and life begins to look ordinary again. And he thought, maybe I did miss something. That was a very good master I went to, and I'd better go back. So back he goes, and the teacher comes on very, very tough and says, you, no, you're no good, you didn't stick with it, why should I take you back? Oh master, I'm so sorry, I didn't realize, I was young and inexperienced, and now I've come to my senses. So the teacher finally says, all right, all right, all right, you're on probation. So again he starts another koan. And this one comes in from a completely different point of view. He's got others that come from this way, and from this way, and from this way. And the point is always, so long as I can beguile you as teacher into thinking that there is something you can get, you need to study with me. When I can no longer fool you into thinking that there's something to get out of life, you'll know that you're alive. You don't get something out of it, you're it. But so long as you can be phased, and you can be taken in by the teacher, you need a teacher. So in the end, when the student no longer needs a teacher, and he sees that this old boy has fooled him the whole way through, he says, at the same time, with profound respect, you wonderful rascal. There's a very strange thing. I've poked around a good deal lately in Japan among Americans and students to find out what's going on, and they tell me that the initial come-on of a Zen master is very tough and very authoritarian and paternalistic, but as you move in, he turns into your older brother, and is a person you feel going right along with you beside you, helping you in this thing, full of friendship and compassion and everything. But occasionally he will suddenly turn, bring on the authoritarian stuff. But they do it in a very strange way. There was a Zen master who on a Saturday morning, when he should have been woken up at eight o'clock, he should have been woken up at eight on Saturdays and seven on weekdays, so this was a Saturday and his attendant monk came and woke him up at eight. He immediately looked at the clock and was absolutely furious that he'd been woken up an hour late, because he didn't know it was Saturday. So he struck out at this monk in a rage, and the monk said, master, but it's Saturday. He said, oh. Anger disappeared, absolutely serene, no apologies. So you see the nature of this game is the Zen game, and I seem to have given away the show to you. I've told you all the inside mechanics of it. But you would discover that if you tangle with a Zen master, and you think you know from what I told you what are the mechanics of it, and you stuck your neck out to put yourself in the position of being an inquirer, everything I had told you would be useless. He would outwit you completely. That's what consists in being a master. He's not doing it because he wants to be superior and to put down other human beings. He's doing it out of great compassion, because he feels he knows something which, if you could find out, you would just be so happy, and would want to give it to everybody else. But you can't give it away, because everybody's got it. What you've got to make them do is to see that they have it, and that you don't give it to them. That's the most difficult task. Your task. You.