Perhaps the special flavor of Zen is best described as a certain directness.
 In other schools of Buddhism, awakening or bodhi seems remote and almost superhuman,
 something to be reached only after many lives of patient effort.
 But in Zen, there is always the feeling that awakening is something quite natural,
 something startlingly obvious, which may occur at any moment.
 If it involves a difficulty, it is just that it is much too simple.
 Zen is also direct in its way of teaching, for it points directly and openly to the truth,
 and does not trifle with symbolism.
 Direct pointing, chi-chi, is the open demonstration of Zen by non-symbolic actions or words,
 which usually appear to the uninitiated as having to do with the most ordinary secular affairs,
 or to be completely crazy.
 In answer to a question about Buddhism, the master makes a casual remark about the weather,
 or performs some simple action which seems to have nothing to do with philosophical or spiritual matters.
 Much of the difficulty and mystification which Zen presents to the Western student
 is the result of his unfamiliarity with Chinese ways of thinking.
 In English, the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished.
 But a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs,
 so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events,
 that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.
 It is not easy to say why we must communicate with others, speak, and with ourselves, think,
 by this one-at-a-time method.
 Life itself does not proceed in this cumbersome, linear fashion,
 and our own organisms could hardly live for a moment
 if they had to control themselves by taking thought of every breath, every beat of the heart, and every neural impulse.
 But if we are to find some explanation for this characteristic of thought,
 the sense of sight offers a suggestive analogy.
 For we have two types of vision, central and peripheral,
 not unlike the spotlight and the floodlight.
 Central vision is used for accurate work like reading,
 in which our eyes are focused on one small area after another like spotlights.
 Peripheral vision is less conscious, less bright than the intense ray of the spotlight.
 We use it for seeing at night and for taking subconscious notice of objects and movements,
 not in the direct line of central vision.
 Unlike the spotlight, it can take in very many things at a time.
 We are not suggesting that Westerners simply do not use the peripheral mind.
 We are human, we use it all the time, and every artist, every workman, every athlete
 calls into play some special development of its powers.
 But it is not academically and philosophically respectable.
 For more information please visit www.fema.gov


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