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.
 But 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 counter-clockwise?"
 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 have answered my questions
 quite naturally and easily, but where is 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.
 �


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