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 Empty and marvelous. The opening words of the oldest Zen poem say that the perfect
 way, Tao, is without difficulty, save that it avoids picking and choosing. Only when
 you stop liking and disliking will all be clearly understood. A split hair's
 difference and heaven and earth are set apart. If you want to get the plain truth,
 be not concerned with right and wrong. The conflict between right and wrong is the
 sickness of the mind. The point is not to make an effort to silence the feelings
 and cultivate bland indifference. It is to see through the universal illusion that
 what is pleasant or good may be wrested from what is painful or evil. To see this
 is to see that good without evil is like up without down, and that to make an ideal
 of pursuing the good is like trying to get rid of the left by turning constantly to
 the right. One is therefore compelled to go around in circles. Zen is a liberation
 from this pattern, and its apparently dismal starting point is to understand the
 absurdity of choosing, of the whole feeling that life may be significantly improved
 by a constant selection of the good. One must start by getting the feel of
 relativity, and by knowing that life is not a situation from which there is anything
 to be grasped or gained, as if it were something which one approaches from
 outside, like a pie or a barrel of beer. To succeed is always to fail, in the sense
 that the more one succeeds in anything, the greater is the need to go on succeeding.
 To eat is to survive to be hungry. The illusion of significant improvement arises
 in moments of contrast, as when one turns from the left to the right on a hard bed.
 The position is better, so long as the contrast remains, but before long the
 second position begins to feel like the first, so one acquires a more comfortable
 bed and, for a while, sleeps in peace. But the solution of the problem leaves a
 strange vacuum in one's consciousness, a vacuum soon filled by the sensation of
 another intolerable contrast, hitherto unnoticed, and just as urgent, just as
 frustrating as the problem of the hard bed. Zen does not take the attitude that it
 is so futile to eat when hungry that one may as well starve, nor is it so inhuman
 as to say that when we itch we should not scratch. Disillusionment with the pursuit
 of the good does not involve the evil of stagnation as its necessary alternative,
 for the human situation is like that of fleas on a hot griddle. None of the
 alternatives offer a solution, for the flea who falls must jump, and the flea
 who jumps must fall. Choosing is absurd because there is no choice, and from this
 point of view one can see the sun in the midst of the rain scoop clear water from
 the heart of the fire. But the viewpoint is not fatalistic. It is not simply
 submission to the inevitability of sweating when it is hot, shivering when it
 is cold, eating when hungry, and sleeping when tired. Submission to fate implies
 someone who submits, someone who is the helpless puppet of circumstances, and for
 Zen there is no such person. The duality of subject and object, of the knower and
 the known, is seen to be just as relative, as mutual, as inseparable as every
 other. We do not sweat because it is hot. The sweating is the heat. It is just as
 true to say that the sun is light because of the eyes as to say that the eyes see
 light because of the sun. The viewpoint is unfamiliar because it is our settled
 convention to think that heat comes first and then, by causality, the body sweats.
 To put it the other way around is startling, like saying cheese and bread
 instead of bread and cheese. Thus the Zen Rin Kushu says, "Fire does not wait for
 the sun to be hot, nor the wind for the moon to be cool." This shocking and
 seemingly illogical reversal of common sense may perhaps be clarified by the
 favorite Zen image of the moon in the water. The phenomenon moon in the water is
 likened to human experience. The water is the subject and the moon the object.
 When there is no water, there is no moon in the water, and likewise when there is
 no moon. But when the moon rises, the water does not wait to receive its image,
 and when even the tiniest drop of water is poured out, the moon does not wait to
 cast its reflection, for the moon does not intend to cast its reflection, and the
 water does not receive its image on purpose. The event is caused as much by
 the water as by the moon, and as the water manifests the brightness of the moon,
 the moon manifests the clarity of the water. To put it less poetically, human
 experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of
 its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals. Men feel
 themselves to be victims or puppets of their experience because they separate
 themselves from their minds, thinking that the nature of the mind-body is
 something involuntarily thrust upon them. They think that they did not ask to be
 born, did not ask to be given a sensitive organism, to be frustrated by
 alternating pleasure and pain. But Zen asks us to find out who it is that has
 the mind, and who it was that did not ask to be born before father and mother
 conceived us. Thence it appears that the entire sense of subjective isolation, of
 being the one who was given a mind and to whom experience happens, is an illusion
 of bad semantics. For there is no "myself" apart from the mind-body, which gives
 structure to my experience. It is likewise ridiculous to talk of this mind-
 body as something which was passively and involuntarily given a certain structure.
 It is that structure, and before the structure arose there was no mind-body.


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