[ Music ]
 In R.H. Blythe's arresting metaphor, when we were just about to swap the fly,
 the fly flew up and sat on the swatter.
 In terms of immediate perception, when we look for things, there is nothing but mind.
 And when we look for mind, there is nothing but things.
 For a moment, we are paralyzed because it seems that we have no basis for action,
 no ground underfoot from which to take a jump.
 But this is the way it always was.
 And in the next moment, we find ourselves as free to act, speak, and think as ever,
 yet in a strange and miraculous new world from which self and other, mind and things have vanished.
 In the words of Te Shan, "Only when you have no thing in your mind and no mind
 in things are you vacant and spiritual, empty and marvelous."
 The marvel can only be described as the peculiar sensation of freedom in action,
 which arises when the world is no longer felt to be some sort
 of obstacle standing over against one.
 This is not freedom in the crude sense of kicking over the traces and behaving in wild caprice.
 It is the discovery of freedom in the most ordinary tasks.
 But when the sense of subjective isolation vanishes,
 the world is no longer felt as an intractable object.
 In the context of Christianity, this might be interpreted as feeling that one has become omnipotent,
 that one is God, directing everything that happens.
 However, it must be remembered that in Taoist and Buddhist thought, there is no conception of a God
 who deliberately and consciously governs the universe.
 Lao Tzu said of the Tao, "To its accomplishments, it lays no claim.
 It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them.
 The Tao, without doing anything, leaves nothing undone."
 To use the imagery of a Tibetan poem, every action, every event comes of itself from the void
 as from the surface of a clear lake there leaps suddenly a fish.
 When this is seen to be as true of the deliberate and the routine as of the surprising
 and the unforeseen, one can agree with the Zen poet Pang Yun,
 "Miraculous power and marvelous activity, drawing water and hewing wood."
 Sitting quietly, doing nothing.
 In both life and art, the cultures of the Far East appreciate nothing more highly
 than spontaneity or naturalness.
 Tzu Chan.
 This is the unmistakable tone of sincerity marking the action which is not studied and contrived.
 For a man rings like a cracked bell when he thinks and acts with a split mind.
 One part standing aside to interfere with the other, to control, to condemn or to admire.
 But the mind or the true nature of man cannot actually be split.
 According to a Zen Rin poem, it is like a sword that cuts but cannot cut itself.
 Like an eye that sees but cannot see itself.
 The illusion of the split comes from the mind's attempt to be both itself and its idea of itself.
 From a fatal confusion of fact with symbol.
 To make an end of the illusion, the mind must stop trying to act upon itself,
 upon its stream of experiences, from the standpoint of the idea of itself, which we call the ego.
 This is expressed in another Zen Rin poem as, "Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself."
 This by itself is the mind's and the world's natural way of action.
 As when the eyes see by themselves and the ears hear by themselves and the mouth opens by itself
 without having to be forced apart by the fingers.
 As the Zen Rin says again, "The blue mountains are of themselves blue mountains.
 The white clouds are of themselves white clouds."
 In its stress upon naturalness, Zen is obviously the inheritor of Taoism
 and its view of spontaneous action as marvelous activity,
 "Miao Yong," which is precisely what the Taoist meant by the word "Te," virtue, with an overtone of magical power.
 But neither in Taoism nor in Zen does it have anything to do with magic
 in the merely sensational sense of performing superhuman miracles.
 The magical or marvelous quality of spontaneous action is on the contrary that it is perfectly human and yet shows no sign of being contrived.
 Perhaps the clue lies in the saying of Jung Men,
 "In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble."
 For the essential quality of naturalness is the sincerity of the undivided mind which does not dither between alternatives.
 But it would be quite wrong to suppose that this natural sincerity comes about by observing such a platitude as
 "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might."
 This is to overlay, not to discover the original mind. Thus to try to be natural is an affectation.
 To try not to be natural is also an affectation.
 Obviously, the mistake arises in the attempt to split the mind against itself.
 But to understand this clearly, we have to enter more deeply into the cybernetics of the mind, the basic pattern of its self-correcting action.
 Feedback enables a machine to be informed of the effects of its own action in such a way as to be able to correct its action.
 Perhaps the most familiar example is the electrical thermostat, which regulates the heating of a house.
 The furnace is adjusted by the feedback system, but this system in turn needs adjustment.
 To make a system more and more automatic will require the use of a series of feedback systems.
 A second to correct the first, a third to correct the second, and so on. But there are obvious limits to such a series.
 In other words, one cannot correct one's means of self-correction indefinitely.
 There must soon be a source of information at the end of the line, which is the final authority.
 Failure to trust its authority will make it impossible to act, and the system will be paralyzed.
 The system can be paralyzed in yet another way.
 Every feedback system needs a margin of lag or error. If we try to make a thermostat absolutely accurate,
 that is to say, if we bring the upper and lower limits of temperature very close together in an attempt to hold the temperature at
 a constant 70 degrees, the whole system will break down.
 When the furnace responds too closely to the thermostat, it cannot go ahead without also trying to stop, or stop without also trying to go ahead.
 This is just what happens to the human being, to the mind, when the desire for certainty and security
 prompts identification between the mind and its own image of itself.
 It cannot let go of itself. It feels that it should not do what it is doing, and that it should do what it is not doing.
 It feels that it should not be what it is, and be what it isn't.
 Furthermore, the effort to remain always good or happy is like trying to hold the thermostat at a constant 70 degrees
 by making the lower limit the same as the upper.
 In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all,
 don't wobble.
 In other words, the mind cannot act without giving up the impossible attempt to control itself beyond a certain point.
 It must let go of itself, both in the sense of trusting its own memory and reflection, and in the sense of acting spontaneously,
 on its own, into the unknown.
 This is why Zen often seems to take the side of action as against reflection, and why it describes itself as no mind,
 wu xin, or no thought, wu nian, and why the masters demonstrate Zen by giving
 instantaneous and unpremeditated answers to questions.
 When Yun Men was asked for the ultimate secret of Buddhism, he replied, "dumpling."
 The attitude of wu xin is by no means an anti-intellectualist exclusion of thinking. Wuxin is action on any level whatsoever,
 physical or psychic, without trying at the same moment to observe and check the action from outside.
 The same is true of the relationship between feeling and action, for feeling blocks action,
 and blocks itself as a form of action when it gets caught in this same tendency to observe or feel itself indefinitely,
 as when, in the midst of enjoying myself, I examine myself to see if I am getting the utmost out of the occasion.
 Not content with tasting the food, I'm also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy,
 I want to feel myself feeling happy, so as to be sure not to miss anything.
 Whether trusting our memories or trusting the mind to act on its own, it comes to the same thing.
 Ultimately, we must act and think, live and die from a source beyond all our knowledge and control.
 In the end, the only alternative to a shuddering paralysis is to leap into action regardless of the consequences.
 Action in this spirit may be right or wrong with respect to conventional standards,
 but our decisions upon the conventional level must be supported by the conviction that whatever we do,
 and whatever happens to us, is ultimately right.
 In other words, we must enter into it without second thought.
 But to act without second thought, without double-mindedness, is by no means a mere precept for our imitation,
 for we cannot realize this kind of action until it is clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is actually impossible to do anything else.
 Now, this impossibility of grasping the mind with the mind is, when realized, the non-action,
 wu-wei, the sitting quietly doing nothing, whereby spring comes and the grass grows by itself.
 Social conditioning fosters the identification of the mind with a fixed idea of itself as the means of self-control,
 and as a result, man thinks of himself as "I," the ego.
 As soon as it becomes important for me to be spontaneous, the intention to be so is strengthened.
 I cannot get rid of it, and yet it is the one thing that stands in the way of its own fulfillment.
 It is as if someone had given me some medicine, with the warning that it will not work if I think of a monkey while taking it.
 While I'm remembering to forget the monkey,
 I am in a double-bind situation where "to do" is "not to do," and vice versa.
 "Yes" implies "no," and "go" implies "stop." At this point, Zen comes to me and asks,
 "If you cannot help remembering the monkey, are you doing it on purpose?"
 In other words, do I have an intention for being intentional?
 Suddenly, I realize that my very intending is spontaneous, or that my controlling self, the ego, arises from my uncontrolled or natural self.
 At this moment, all the machinations of the ego come to naught. It is annihilated in its own trap.
 I see that it is actually impossible not to be spontaneous. For what I cannot help doing, I am doing spontaneously.
 But if I am at the same time trying to control it, I interpret it as a compulsion.
 As the Zen master said,
 "Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh."
 In this moment, the whole quality of consciousness is changed, and I feel myself in a new world in which, however,
 it is obvious that I have always been living.
 As soon as I recognize that my voluntary and purposeful action happens spontaneously,
 by itself, just like breathing, hearing, and feeling, I am no longer caught in the contradiction of trying to be spontaneous.
 There is no real contradiction, since trying is spontaneity.
 Seeing this, the compulsive, blocked, and tied-up feeling vanishes.
 It is just as if I had been absorbed in a tug-of-war between my two hands and had forgotten that both were mine.
 The new world in which I find myself has an extraordinary transparency of freedom from barriers,
 making it seem that I have somehow become the empty space in which everything is happening.
 One stops trying to be spontaneous by seeing that it is unnecessary to try, and then and there it can happen.
 The Zen masters often bring out this state by the device of evading a question, and then, as the questioner turns to go,
 calling him suddenly by name. As he naturally replies, "Yes," the master exclaims, "There it is."
 To the logician, it will seem, of course, that the point at which we have arrived is pure nonsense, as in a way it is.
 From the Buddhist point of view, reality itself has no meaning, since it is not a sign pointing to something beyond itself.
 To arrive at reality, at suchness, is to go beyond karma, beyond consequential action, and to enter a life which is completely aimless.
 Yet to Zen, this is the very life of the universe, which is complete at every moment and does not need to justify itself by aiming at something beyond.
 To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary,
 it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons,
 beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf, forever washing the sand to no end.
 Furthermore, the Zen experience is more of a conclusion than a premise.
 It is never to be used as the first step in a line of ethical or metaphysical reasoning, since conclusions draw to it rather than from it.
 To try to formulate the Zen experience as a proposition,
 "Everything is the Tao," and then to analyze it and draw conclusions from it, is to miss it completely.
 To say that "everything is the Tao" almost gets the point, but just at the moment of getting it, the words crumble into nonsense,
 for we are here at a limit at which words break down because they have always implied a meaning beyond themselves.
 And here, there is no meaning beyond.
 Although profoundly inconsequential, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction,
 to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied, it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
 The characteristic notes of the spontaneous life are "mo chi chu," or "going ahead without hesitation,"
 "wu wei," which may here be understood as purposelessness,
 and "wu xi," lack of affectation or simplicity.
 Much of Zen training consists in confronting the student with dilemmas,
 which he is expected to handle without stopping to deliberate and choose.
 The response to the situation must follow with the immediacy of sound issuing from the hands when they are clapped, or sparks from a flint when struck.
 The master may begin a conversation with the student by asking a series of very ordinary questions about trivial matters,
 to which the student responds with perfect spontaneity, but suddenly the master will say,
 "When the bath water flows down the drain, does it turn clockwise or counterclockwise?"
 As the student stops at the unexpectedness of the question and perhaps tries to remember which way it goes, the master shouts,
 "Don't think! Act! This way!" and whirls his hand in the air, or perhaps less helpfully he may say,
 "So far you've answered my questions quite naturally and easily, but where's your difficulty now?"
 The student likewise is free to challenge the master, and one can imagine that in the days when Zen training was less formal,
 the members of Zen communities must have had enormous fun laying traps for each other.
 In effect then, in the discipline of Zen, when you finally convince the master that you are stupid enough to be accepted as a student,
 because you've persisted and because you've defined yourself as someone having a problem,
 he has warned you well in advance that he has nothing to teach,
 but he says, "Now I will ask you a question."
 There are many ways of asking this question,
 but they all boil down to one common theme,
 and that is, "Who are you?"
 You say you have a problem.
 You say you would like to get out of the sufferings of life. You say you would like to get one up on the universe.
 I want to know who's asking this question.
 Show me you.
 Only they put it in such ways as,
 "Before your father and mother conceived you,
 what was your original nature?"
 Questions like that.
 And they'll say, "Now look, I want to be shown. I don't want a lot of ideas about who you are.
 I don't want to know who you are in terms of a social role,
 you know, that you have such degrees or you have such professional qualifications and such a name and such a family.
 Oh, that's the past.
 I want to see you genuinely now."
 It's like saying to a person,
 "Now don't be self-conscious, see? I want you right this minute to be completely sincere."
 "There was a young man who said, 'Though
 it seems that I know that I know,
 what I would like to see is the eye that knows me when I know that I know that I know.'"
 And so this is the Zen
 trick.
 It's to put you into this situation
 in a very crucial way.
 To think about, thinking about, thinking about, thinking about.
 Or just the same thing,
 to make a very strong effort not to think.
 That's Zazen.
 Sit,
 let your senses operate and be responsive to whatever there may be around, but don't think about it.
 But now this is already thinking. I'm thinking about not thinking.
 How will I stop thinking about not thinking?
 So there you are. See, you're all caught up. It's like somebody came to you and they put tar in one hand,
 molasses,
 feathers in the other, slap the two hands together and rub them around, said, "Now pick off the feathers."
 In Zen, the double bind is put on you deliberately,
 knowing how stupid it is.
 The teacher is well aware of everything he's doing and what tricks he's playing on you.
 Because he has behind it all the compassionate intent
 of getting you into such a fierce double bind that you will see how stupid it is.
 So then what happens is this.
 He gives you the double bind.
 Be genuine. I want to see you do something that is the real you.
 I had a friend who was studying Zen and
 he was given some koan like this to work on.
 And uh,
 when he was one day going for his interview,
 he walked through the garden that connected the
 Sodo, or the monk's study quarters, with the master's place.
 And there was a big bullfrog.
 Bullfrogs in this country are rather tame. People don't eat them.
 And so he swept up the bullfrog and dropped it into the sleeve of his kimono.
 And when he got in front of the teacher to answer the koan,
 that is to say, to do spontaneously produce his genuine self, he produced the bullfrog.
 And the teacher looked at it and shook his head and said, "Mmm-mmm. Too intellectual."
 Or as we might say, "Too contrived. Too studied." That's not yet you.
 How do you see the bind in this?
 It's like being told
 that everything is all right at this moment so long as you don't think of a green elephant.
 So try not to think of a green elephant. See?
 Now as he works at this, as he tries to produce the genuine you,
 the teacher really strings him out on this and makes him work and work and work over a period of many months.
 Until he comes to the point of seeing
 this.
 There is nothing you can do to be genuine.
 The more you do, the phonier you are.
 But at the opposite extreme, there is nothing you can not do.
 That is to say, you cannot give up trying to be genuine.
 You can't relax, you know, and be completely passive.
 And say, "Well, let's forget about it.
 Let's think about practical matters and forget all these spiritual concerns." The moment you do that, you're
 abandonment of trying is itself an insidious form of trying.
 The way of Buddhism
 is to let go of yourself,
 to
 see that you live in a universe in which nothing can be grasped.
 Therefore, stop grasping.
 So here's the problem.
 I come and say to the teacher, "Teach me not to grasp." He'll say, "Why do you want to know?"
 And he shows you that the reason why you want to stop grasping is that it's a new form of grasping.
 You feel that you will beat the game
 by being unattached.
 Zen is not merely a cult of impulsive action.
 The point is not to eliminate reflective thought, but to eliminate blocking in both action and thought,
 so that the response of the mind is always like a ball in a mountain stream.
 One thought after another, without hesitation.
 There is something similar in this to the psychoanalytic practice of free association, employed as a technique to get rid of obstacles
 to the free flow of thought from the unconscious.
 The simplest cure is to feel free to block, so that one does not block at blocking. When one feels free to block,
 the blocking automatically eliminates itself. It is like riding a bicycle. When one starts falling to the left,
 one does not resist the fall by turning to the right.
 One turns the wheel to the left and the balance is restored.
 Blocking is perhaps the best translation of the Zen term "nyen," as it occurs in the phrase "wu nyen,"
 "no thought," or better, "no second thought."
 Taekwon points out that this is the real meaning of attachment in Buddhism, as when it is said that a Buddha is free from worldly
 attachments.
 It does not mean that he is a stone Buddha with no feelings, no emotions, and no sensations of hunger or pain.
 It means that he does not block at anything.
 Thus, it is typical of Zen that its style of action enters into everything wholeheartedly and freely, without having to keep an eye on itself.
 It does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes.
 Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
 As the fish swims in the water, but is unmindful of the water, the bird flies in the wind, but knows not of the wind.
 So the true life of Zen has no need to raise waves when no wind is blowing,
 to drag in religion or spirituality as something over and above life itself.
 This is why the sage Fa Yung received no more offerings of flowers from the birds after he had had his interview with the fourth patriarch,
 for his holiness no longer stood out like a sore thumb.
 It is often said that to be clinging to oneself is like having a thorn in the skin, and that Buddhism is a second thorn to extract the first.
 When it is out,
 both thorns are thrown away.
 But in the moment when Buddhism, when philosophy or religion, becomes another way of clinging to oneself,
 so seeking a spiritual security, the two thorns become one.
 And how is it to be taken out?
 This, as Bankai said, is "wiping off blood with blood."
 Therefore in Zen, there is neither self nor Buddha, to which one can cling, no good to gain and no evil to be avoided,
 no thoughts to be eradicated, no mind to be purified, no body to perish, and no soul to be saved.
 At one blow, this entire framework of abstractions is shattered to fragments.
 It should not be assumed that a person who has passed a koan or got a Zen story is necessarily a transformed human being.
 Nor should it be assumed that Satori is a single sudden leap from the common consciousness to complete, unexcelled awakening.
 Satori really designates the sudden and intuitive way of seeing into anything,
 whether it be remembering a forgotten name or seeing into the deepest principles of Buddhism.
 One seeks and seeks but cannot find. One then gives up and the answer comes by itself.
 Thus, there may be many occasions of Satori in the course of training,
 Great Satori and Little Satori, and the solution of many of the koan depends upon nothing more sensational than the kind of knack
 for understanding the Zen style of handling Buddhist principles.
 Western ideas of Buddhist attainments are all too often distorted by the mysterious East approach and by the sensational fantasies
 so widely circulated in theosophical writings during the decades just before and after the turn of the century.
 Zen masters are quite human. They get sick and die.
 They know joy and sorrow.
 They have bad tempers or other little weaknesses of characters just like anyone else,
 and they are not above falling in love and entering into a fully human relationship with the opposite sex.
 The perfection of Zen is to be perfectly and simply human.
 The difference of the adept in Zen from the ordinary run of men is that the latter are in one way or another
 at odds with their own humanity and are attempting to be angels or demons.
 [Music]
 Zen in the Arts
 [Music]
 Happily,
 it is possible for us not only to hear about Zen, but also to see it.
 Since one showing is worth a hundred sayings, the expression of Zen in the arts gives us one of the most direct ways of understanding it.
 This is the more so because the art forms which Zen has created are not symbolic in the same way as other types of Buddhist art,
 or as is religious art as a whole.
 The favorite subjects of Zen artists, whether painters or poets, are what we would call natural, concrete, and secular things.
 Even when they turn to the Buddha or to the patriarchs and masters of Zen, they depict them in a peculiarly down-to-earth and human way.
 Furthermore, the arts of Zen are not merely or primarily representational.
 Even in painting, the work of art is considered not only as representing nature, but as being itself a work of nature.
 For the very technique involves the art of artlessness, or what Saburo Hasegawa has called the "controlled accident,"
 so that paintings are formed as naturally as the rocks and grasses which they depict.
 The art forms of the Western world arise from spiritual and philosophical traditions in which spirit is divided from nature and comes down from heaven
 to work upon it as an intelligent energy upon an inert and recalcitrant stuff.
 Thus, Malraux speaks always of the artist "conquering" his medium, as explorers and scientists speak of "conquering mountains" or "conquering space."
 To Chinese and Japanese ears, these are grotesque expressions, for when you climb, it is the mountain as much as your own legs
 which lifts you upwards, and when you paint, it is the brush, ink, and paper which determine the result as much as your own hand.
 The expression of this whole attitude in the arts is perhaps best approached through painting and poetry.
 Since writing and poetry were among the chief preoccupations of Chinese scholars, and since the Chinese way of painting is closely akin to writing,
 the roles of scholar, artist, and poet were not widely separated.
 The result was a tremendous cross-fertilization of philosophical, scholarly, poetic, and artistic pursuits,
 in which the Zen and Taoist feeling for naturalness became the dominant note.
 Shiploads of monks amounting almost to floating monasteries, plied between China and Japan, carrying not only sutras and Chinese classical books,
 but also tea, silk, pottery, incense, paintings, drugs, musical instruments, and every refinement of Chinese culture, not to mention Chinese artists and craftsmen.
 Closest to the feeling of Zen was a calligraphic style of painting, done with black ink on paper or silk, usually a painting and poem in one.
 Chinese black ink is capable of a great variety of tones, varied by the amount of water,
 and the ink itself is found in an enormous number of qualities and colors of black.
 The ink comes in a solid stick and is prepared by pouring a little water into a flat stone dish,
 upon which the stick is rubbed, until the liquid is of the required density.
 Writing or painting is done with a sharply pointed brush, set in a bamboo stem, a brush
 which is held upright without resting the wrist on the paper, and whose soft hairs give its strokes a great versatility.
 Since the touch of the brush is so light and fluid, and since it must move continuously over the absorbent paper if the ink is to flow out regularly,
 its control requires a free movement of the hand and arm, as if one were dancing rather than writing on paper.
 In short, it is a perfect instrument for the expression of unhesitating spontaneity,
 and a single stroke is enough to give away one's character to an experienced observer.
 One of the most striking features is the relative emptiness of the picture,
 an emptiness which appears, however, to be part of the painting and not just unpainted background.
 By filling in just one corner, the artist makes the whole area of the picture alive.
 Ma Yuan, in particular, was a master of this technique, which amounts almost to "painting by not painting," or what Zen sometimes calls
 "playing the stringless lute."
 The secret lies in knowing how to balance form with emptiness, and above all, in knowing when one has said enough.
 Equally impressive is the mastery of the brush, of strokes ranging from delicate elegance to rough vitality,
 from minutely detailed trees to bold outlines and masses given texture by the controlled accidents of stray brush hairs
 and uneven inking of the paper.
 In poetry, the empty space is the surrounding silence, which a two-line poem requires,
 a silence of the mind in which one does not think about the poem, but actually feels the sensation which it evokes,
 all the more strongly for having said so little.
 By the 17th century, the Japanese had brought this wordless poetry to perfection in the haiku,
 the poem of just 17 syllables, which drops the subject almost as it takes it up.
 To non-Japanese people, haiku are apt to seem no more than beginnings or even titles for poems, and in translation,
 it is impossible to convey the effect of their sound and rhythm.
 However, translation can usually convey the image, and this is the important point.
 Of course, there are many haiku which seem as stilted as the Japanese paintings on cheap lacquer trays for export,
 but the non-Japanese listener
 must remember that a good haiku is a pebble thrown into the pool of the listener's mind,
 evoking associations out of the richness of his own memory.
 It invites the listener to participate, instead of leaving him dumb with admiration while the poet shows off.
 The development of the haiku was largely the work of Basho,
 1643 to 1694, whose feeling for Zen wanted to express itself in a type of poetry altogether in the spirit of wuxi,
 nothing special.
 Basho wrote his haiku in the simplest type of Japanese speech,
 naturally avoiding literary and highbrow language, so creating a style which made it possible for ordinary people to be poets.
 The haiku sees things in their suchness, without comment, a view of the world which the Japanese call "sono mama,"
 "just as it is" or "just so."
 "Weeds in the rice field, cut and left lying, just so." "Fertilizer."
 Haiku and waka poems convey perhaps more easily than painting the subtle differences between the four moods of sabi,
 wabi, aware, and yugen.
 The quiet, thrilling loneliness of sabi is loneliness in the sense of Buddhist detachment,
 of seeing all things as happening by themselves in miraculous spontaneity.
 With this goes that sense of deep, illimitable quietude which descends with a long fall of snow,
 swallowing all sounds in layer upon layer of softness.
 Sleet falling,
 fathomless, infinite loneliness.
 Wabi, the unexpected recognition of the faithful suchness of very ordinary things,
 especially when the gloom of the future has momentarily checked our ambitiousness, is perhaps the mood of the following haiku.
 "A brushwood gate, and for a lock this snail."
 "The woodpecker keeps on in the same place, day is closing."
 "Winter desolation, in the rainwater tub sparrows are walking."
 Aware is not quite grief,
 and not quite nostalgia in the usual sense of longing for the return of a beloved past.
 Aware is the echo of what has passed and of what was loved, giving them a resonance such as a great cathedral gives to a choir,
 so that they would be the poorer without it.
 Aware is the moment of crisis between seeing the transience of the world with sorrow and regret,
 and seeing it as the very form of the great void.
 "The stream hides itself in the grasses of departing autumn."
 "Leaves falling lie on one another, the rain beats on the rain."
 Since Yugen signifies a kind of mystery, it is the most baffling of all to describe, and the poems must speak for themselves.
 "The sea darkens, the voices of the wild ducks are faintly white."
 "The skylark, its voice alone fell, leaving nothing behind."
 "In the dense mist, what is being shouted between hill and boat?"
 "A trout leaps, clouds are moving in the bed of the stream."
 The association of Zen with poetry must inevitably bring up the name of the Soto Zen monk and hermit, Ryokan.
 It is easy to form the impression that the Japanese love of nature is predominantly sentimental,
 dwelling on those aspects of nature which are nice and pretty.
 Butterflies, cherry blossoms, the autumn moon, chrysanthemums, and old pine trees.
 But Ryokan is also the poet of lice, fleas, and being utterly soaked with cold rain.
 On rainy days, the monk Ryokan feels sorry for himself.
 And Ryokan's view of nature is all of a piece.
 The sound of the scouring of the saucepan blends with the tree frog's voices.
 He thinks of the lice on his chest as insects in the grass and expresses the most natural human feelings,
 sadness, loneliness, bewilderment, or pity, without a trace of shame or pride.
 Even when robbed, he is still rich, for
 the thief left it behind,
 the moon at the window.
 And when Ryokan has no money,
 the wind brings fallen leaves, enough to make a fire.
 The sense of an infinitely expanded present is nowhere stronger than in "cha no yu", the art of tea.
 Strictly, the term means something like "tea with hot water".
 And through this one art, Zen has exercised an incalculable influence on Japanese life.
 Since the "cha jin", or man of tea, is an arbiter of taste in the many subsidiary arts which "cha no yu" involves.
 Architecture, gardening, ceramics, metalwork, lacquer, and the arrangement of flowers, or "ikebana".
 Ceremonial tea is not the ordinary leaf tea, which is steeped in hot water.
 It is finely powdered green tea, mixed with hot water by means of a bamboo whisk,
 until it becomes what a Chinese writer called "the froth of the liquid jade".
 "Cha no yu" is most appreciated when confined to a small group, or just two companions, and was especially loved by the old-time samurai,
 as today by harassed businessmen, as a frank escape from the turmoil of the world.
 Ideally, the house for "cha no yu" is a small hut set apart from the main dwelling in its own garden.
 The hut is floored with tatami, or straw mats, enclosing a fire pit.
 The roof is usually thatched with rice straw, and the walls, as in all Japanese homes, are paper shoji,
 supported by uprights of wood with a natural finish.
 One side of the room is occupied by an alcove, or "toko-noma", the position for a single hanging scroll of painting or calligraphy,
 together with a rock, a spray of flowers, or some other object of art.
 The atmosphere, though formal, is strangely relaxed, and the guests feel free to talk or watch in silence as they wish.
 The host takes his time to prepare a charcoal fire, and with a bamboo dipper, pours water into a squat kettle of soft brown iron.
 In the same formal but completely unhurried manner, he brings in the other utensils, a plate with a few cakes, the tea bowl and caddy,
 the whisk, and a larger bowl for leavings.
 During these preparations, a casual conversation continues, and soon the water in the kettle begins to simmer and sigh,
 so that the guests fall silent to listen.
 After a while, the host serves tea to the guests, one by one, from the same bowl,
 taking it from the caddy with a strip of bamboo bent into a spoon,
 pouring water from the kettle with the long-handled dipper,
 whipping it into a froth with the whisk, and laying the bowl before the first guest, with its most interesting side towards him.
 The bowls used for Chan-o-yu are normally dull-colored and rough-finished,
 often unglazed at the base, and on the sides, the glaze has usually been allowed to run, an original fortunate mistake,
 which has been seen to offer endless opportunities for the controlled accident.
 Specially favored are Korean rice bowls, of the cheapest quality,
 a peasant ware of crude texture, from which the tea masters have selected unintentional masterpieces of form.
 The tea caddy is often of tarnished silver, or infinitely deep black lacquer, though sometimes old pottery medicine jars are used,
 purely functional articles, which were again picked out by the masters for their unaffected beauty.
 A celebrated caddy once smashed to pieces was mended with gold cement, and became the much more treasured,
 for the haphazard network of thin gold lines which then covered its surface.
 After the tea has been drunk, the guests may ask to inspect all the utensils which have been used,
 since every one of them has been made or chosen with the utmost care, and often brought out for the occasion
 because of some feature that would particularly appeal to one of the guests.
 The style of garden that goes with Zen and Chanu-yu is not, of course, one of those ornate imitation landscapes with bronze cranes and miniature pagodas.
 The intention of the best Japanese gardens is not to make a realistic illusion of landscape,
 but simply to suggest the general atmosphere of mountain and water in a small space,
 so arranging the design of the garden that it seems to have been helped, rather than governed, by the hand of man.
 The Zen gardener has no mind to impose his own intention upon natural forms,
 but is careful rather to follow the intentionless intention of the forms themselves.
 The major art which contributes to such gardens is bonseki, which may well be called the growing of rocks.
 It requires difficult expeditions to the seashore, to mountains, and to rivers, in search of rock forms
 which wind and water have shaped into asymmetrical living contours.
 These are carted to the garden site and placed so as to look as if they had grown where they stand,
 so as to be related to the surrounding space or to the area of sand in the same way as figure to background in Sung paintings.
 Because the rock must look as if it had always been in the same position,
 it must have the air of moss-covered antiquity, and rather than try to plant moss on the rock,
 the rock is first set for some years in a place where the moss will grow by itself, and thereafter is moved to its final position.
 Every one of the arts which have been discussed involves a technical training which follows the same essential principles as training in Zen.
 The best account of this training thus far available in a western language is Eugen Herigel's Zen in the Art of Archery,
 which is the author's story of his own experience under a master of the Japanese bow.
 The major problem of each of these disciplines is to bring the student to the point from which he can really begin.
 Herigel spent almost five years trying to find the right way of releasing the bow string, for it had to be done unintentionally,
 in the same way as a ripe fruit bursts its skin.
 His problem was to resolve the paradox of practicing relentlessly without ever trying, and to let go of the taught string
 intentionally without intention.
 His master, at one and the same time, urged him to keep on working and working, but also to stop making an effort,
 for the art cannot be learned unless the arrow shoots itself, unless the string is released
 wu-xian and wu-nian, without mind and without thought.
 The same is true in learning to use the brush for writing or painting. The brush must draw by itself.
 This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly, but neither can it happen if one makes an effort.
 Similarly, in swordsmanship, one must not first decide upon a certain thrust and then attempt to make it, since by that time it will be too late.
 Decision and action must be simultaneous.
 This was the point of Dogen's image of firewood and ashes, for to say that firewood does not become
 ashes is to say that it has no intention to be ash before it is actually ash, and then it is no longer firewood.
 Dogen insisted that the two states were clearly cut, and in the same way, Herigel's master did not want him to mix the two states
 of stretching and releasing the bow.
 He instructed him to draw it to the point of fullest tension and stop there without any purpose, any intention in mind as to what to do next.
 Likewise, in Dogen's view of Zazen, one must be sitting just to sit, and there must not be any intention to have satori.
 The sudden visions of nature which form the substance of haiku arise in the same way,
 for they are never there when one looks for them. The artificial haiku always feels like a piece of life
 which has been deliberately broken off or wrenched away from the universe,
 whereas the genuine haiku has dropped off all by itself and has the whole universe inside it.
 Because Zen does not involve an ultimate dualism between the controller and the controlled, the mind and the body, the spiritual and the material,
 there is always a certain physiological aspect to its techniques.
 Whether Zen is practiced through Zazen or Chanoyu or Kendo, great importance is attached to the way of breathing.
 Not only is breathing one of the two fundamental rhythms of the body, it is also the process in which control and spontaneity,
 voluntary and involuntary action, find their most obvious identity.
 So-called normal breathing is fitful and anxious.
 The air is always being held and not fully released, for the individual seems incapable of letting it run its full course through the lungs.
 He breathes compulsively rather than freely. The technique, therefore, begins by encouraging a full release of the breath,
 easing it out, as if the body were being emptied of air by a great leaden ball
 sinking through the chest and abdomen and settling down into the ground.
 The returning in-breath is then allowed to follow as a simple reflex action. The air is not actively inhaled,
 it is just allowed to come, and then, when the lungs are comfortably filled, it is allowed to go out once more.
 The image of the leaden ball giving it the sense of falling out as distinct from being pushed out.
 But just as there is no need to try to be in accord with the Tao, to try to see or to try to hear,
 so it must be remembered that the breath will always take care of itself.
 This is not a breathing exercise so much as a watching and letting of the breath,
 and it is always a serious mistake to undertake it in the spirit of a compulsive discipline to be practiced with a goal in mind.
 This way of breathing is not for special times alone. Like Zen itself, it is for all circumstances whatsoever.
 And in this way, every human activity can become a form of Zazen.
 In its own way, each one of the arts which Zen has inspired gives vivid expression to the sudden or
 instantaneous quality of its view of the world.
 The momentariness of Sumi paintings and haiku and the total presence of mind required in Chanoyu and Kendo
 bring out the real reason why Zen has always called itself the way of instantaneous awakening.
 It is not just that Satori comes quickly and unexpectedly all of a sudden, for mere speed has nothing to do with it.
 The reason is that Zen is a liberation from time.
 For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and
 the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
 Until this has become clear,
 it seems that our life is all past and future, and that the present is nothing more than the
 infinitesimal hairline which divides them. From this comes the sensation of having no time, of a world which hurries by so
 rapidly that it is gone before we can enjoy it.
 But through awakening to the instant, one sees that this is the reverse of the truth.
 It is rather the past and future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real.
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