The Way Of Zen

Audio Renaissance presents The Way of Zen by Alan W. Watts.

Read for you by Ralph Blum with recordings of Alan W. Watts.

Zen Buddhism is a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought.

It is not a religion or philosophy, it is not a psychology or a type of science.

It is an example of what is known in India and China as a way of liberation, and is similar in this respect to Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga.

As will soon be obvious, a way of liberation can have no positive definition.

It has to be suggested by saying what it is not, somewhat as a sculptor reveals an image by the act of removing pieces of stone from a block.

Historically, Zen may be regarded as the fulfillment of long traditions of Indian and Chinese culture,

though it is actually much more Chinese than Indian.

And, since the 12th century, it has rooted itself deeply and most creatively in the culture of Japan.

As the fruition of these great cultures, and as a unique and particularly instructive example of a way of liberation,

Zen is one of the most precious gifts of Asia to the world.

The word Zen is Japanese way of pronouncing the Chinese word Chan,

Zen, which in turn is the Chinese way of pronouncing the Sanskrit word Jnana.

And Jnana is a very difficult word to translate into English, if not impossible.

It has been called meditation.

Meditation in English generally means sitting quietly and thinking about something.

And that is not what Zen is.

Contemplation might come a little nearer if you use the word in a very technical sense,

the sense that it was used, or still is used, among Catholic mystics.

Perhaps that's something a bit like Zen.

But, again, contemplation, as we normally use the word, has a sense of inactivity.

A sense of not doing anything, of being completely still and passive,

whereas Zen is something highly active.

So we really don't have an English word for Jnana, Chan, Zen.

I would say that we do know what it is,

because we do all sorts of things every day of our lives in the spirit.

When, for example, you drive a car,

or when a rider of a horse is one being with a horse,

when you watch a good cowboy or a cavalry rider,

he's glued to the horse.

He's like a centaur almost.

As the horse moves, he moves.

Which is in control?

Is the horse riding the man or the man riding the horse?

You practically don't know.

Same way when you have an excellent dancing partner.

Who leads?

Who follows?

It seems as if you are one body and you move together.

That is Zen.

That is Jnana.

And so, in a wider sense,

when a person doesn't react to life,

on the one hand,

or try to dominate it on the other,

but when the internal world of one's own organism

and the external world of other people and other things

move together as if they were and indeed are

one and the same motion,

that is Zen.

So, you could say in a very, very simple way

that the real concern of Zen is to realize,

not merely to think,

but to know in your bones

that the inside world inside your skin

and the outside world outside your skin

going out as far as anything can go

into galaxies beyond galaxies

is all one world

and all one being,

oneself,

and you're it.

The origins of Zen

are as much Taoist as Buddhist,

and because its flavor

is so peculiarly Chinese,

it may be best to begin

by inquiring into its Chinese ancestry.

Chinese civilization was at least 2,000 years old

when it first encountered Buddhism.

China absorbed Buddhism

as it has absorbed

so many other external influences,

not only philosophies and ideas,

but also alien populations and invaders.

Undoubtedly, this is due in some measure

to the extraordinary stability and maturity

which the Chinese have derived from Confucianism.

Reasonable, unfanatical, humanistic,

Confucianism is one of the most workable patterns

of social convention that the world has known.

Coupled with the

let-well-enough-alone attitude of Taoism,

it nurtured a mellow

and rather easygoing type of mentality

which, when it absorbed Buddhism,

did much to make it more practical.

That is to say,

it made Buddhism a possible way of life

for human beings,

for people with families,

with everyday work to do,

and with normal instincts and passions.

Generally speaking,

Confucianism concerns itself

with the linguistic,

ethical,

legal,

and ritual conventions

which provide the society

with its system of communication.

Confucianism, in other words,

preoccupies itself

with conventional knowledge,

and under its auspices,

children are brought up

so that their originally wayward

and whimsical natures

are made to fit the

procrustean bed

of the social order.

The individual defines himself

and his place in society

in terms of the Confucian formulae.

Taoism, on the other hand,

is generally a pursuit of older men,

and especially of men

who are retiring from active life

in the community.

Their retirement from society

is a kind of outward symbol

of an inward liberation

from the bounds

of conventional patterns

of thought and conduct.

For Taoism concerns itself

with unconventional knowledge,

with the understanding

of life directly,

instead of in the abstract,

linear terms

of representational thinking.

The reason why Taoism and Zen

present at first sight

such a puzzle

to the Western mind

is that we have taken

a restricted view

of human knowledge.

For us,

almost all knowledge

is what a Taoist

would call conventional knowledge,

because we do not feel

that we really know anything

unless we can represent it

to ourselves in words

or in some other system

of communication.

To begin to understand

what Taoism is about,

we must at least be prepared

to admit the possibility

of some view of the world

other than the conventional,

some knowledge

other than the contents

of our surface consciousness,

which can apprehend reality

only in the form

of one thought at a time.

There is no real difficulty

in this,

for we will already admit

that we know

how to move our hands,

how to make a decision,

or how to breathe,

even though we can hardly

begin to explain

how we do it in words.

We know how to do it

because we just do it.

Taoism is an extension

of this kind of knowledge,

an extension which gives us

a very different view

of ourselves

from that to which

we are conventionally accustomed,

and a view

which liberates

the human mind

from its constricting

identification

with the abstract ego.

The West has no

recognized institution

corresponding to Taoism

because our Hebrew-Christian

spiritual tradition

identifies the absolute God

with the moral

and logical order

of convention.

The important difference

between the Tao

and the usual idea of God

is that whereas God

produces the world

by making,

way,

the Tao produces it

by not making,

woo-way,

which is approximately

what we mean by growing.

Things which are made

are separate parts

put together,

like machines,

or things fashioned

from without inwards,

like sculptures.

whereas things that are grown

divide themselves into parts

from within outwards.

Because the natural universe

works mainly according

to the principles of growth,

it would seem quite odd

to the Chinese mind

to ask how it was made.

If the universe were made,

there would, of course,

be someone who knows

how it was made,

who could explain

how it was put together

bit by bit,

as a technician can explain

in one-at-a-time words

how to assemble a machine.

But a universe which grows

utterly excludes the possibility

of knowing how it grows

in the clumsy terms

of thought and language,

so that no Taoist

would dream of asking

whether the Tao knows

how it produces the universe,

for it operates

according to spontaneity,

not according to plan.

It is really impossible

to appreciate what is meant

by the Tao

without becoming,

in a rather special sense,

stupid.

So long as the conscious intellect

is frantically trying

to clutch the world

in its net of abstractions,

and to insist that life

be bound and fitted

to its rigid categories,

the mood of Taoism

will remain incomprehensible,

and the intellect

will wear itself out.

The Tao is accessible

only to the mind

which can practice

the simple and subtle art

of Wu Wei.

It is not simply

calmness of mind,

but non-graspingness

of the mind,

signified by Wu Xin,

literally,

no mind,

which is to say,

un-self-consciousness.

It is a state of wholeness

in which the mind

functions freely and easily,

without the sensation

of a second mind

or ego

standing over it

with a club.

If the ordinary man

is one who has to walk

by lifting his legs

with his hands,

the Taoist is one

who has learned

to let the legs

walk by themselves.

Each of the other senses

might similarly be used

to illustrate

the non-active functioning

of the mind

listening without

straining to hear,

smelling without

strong inhalation,

tasting without

screwing up the tongue,

and touching

without pressing

the object.

Each is a special

instance of the

mental function

which works through all

and which Chinese

language designates

with the peculiar

word Xin.

We usually translate it

as mind or heart,

but neither of these

words is satisfactory.

The difficulty

with our translations

is that mind

is too intellectual,

too cortical,

and that heart,

in its current

English usage,

is too emotional,

even sentimental.

The mind in Chinese

is Xin,

and it isn't quite

what we mean by mind.

They locate it here,

Japanese kokoro.

We locate our mind

here,

but this mind here,

the heart mind,

is the psychic center.

When you say,

I have no peace of mind,

it doesn't mean you've

just got a headache.

You may have a heartache,

too.

It's a more inclusive word.

You might call it

the center of psychic activity.

The important point

is that according

to both Taoism

and Zen,

the center of the mind's

activity is not

in the conscious

thinking process,

not in the ego.

When a man has learned

to let his mind alone

so that it functions

in the integrated

and spontaneous way

that is natural to it,

he begins to show

the special kind of virtue

or power

called Te.

This is not virtue

in the current sense

of moral rectitude,

but in the older sense

of effectiveness,

as when one speaks

of the healing virtues

of a plant.

Te is furthermore

unaffected

or spontaneous virtue,

which cannot be cultivated

or imitated

by any deliberate method.

In some, then,

Te is the unthinkable ingenuity

and creative power

of man's spontaneous

and natural functioning,

a power which is blocked

when one tries to master it

in terms of formal methods

and techniques.

It is like the centipede's skill

in using a hundred legs

at once.

The centipede was happy,

quite,

until a toad in fun said,

pray which leg

goes after which.

This worked his mind

to such a pitch,

he lay distracted

in a ditch

considering how to run.

Taoism is, then,

the original Chinese

way of liberation

which combined

with Indian Mahayana Buddhism

to produce Zen.

It is a liberation

from convention

and of the creative

power of day.

Every attempt

to describe

and formulate it

in words

and one-at-a-time

thought symbols

must, of necessity,

distort it.

The qualities

which distinguish

Zen or Chan

from other types

of Buddhism

are rather elusive

when it comes

to putting them

in words.

Yet Zen has a definite

and unmistakable flavor.

Although the name Zen

is Jhana

or meditation,

other schools

of Buddhism

emphasize meditation

as much as,

if not more than,

Zen.

And at times

it seems as if

the practice

of formal meditation

were not necessary

to Zen at all.

Nor is Zen

peculiar in having

nothing to say,

in insisting

that the truth

cannot be put into words,

for this is already

present in the teachings

of Lao Tzu.

Those who know

do not speak,

those who speak

do not know.

Perhaps

the special flavor

of Zen

is best described

as a certain directness.

In other schools

of Buddhism,

awakening 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,

Qi Qi,

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.

Zen tradition

maintains that

immediate awakening

is not communicated

by the sutras,

but has passed down

directly from master

to pupil.

This does not

necessarily imply

anything so esoteric

as an experience

conveyed by telepathy,

but something

much less sensational.

Thus,

when Hindu pandits

insist that wisdom

is not to be gained

from the scriptures

but only from a teacher

or guru,

it means that

the actual texts,

such as the Yoga Sutra,

contain only the headings

of the doctrine

and that its full explanation

requires someone

who has learned

the oral tradition.

To this it should

be necessary to add

that since the tradition

is primarily an experience,

words can communicate

it no more

and no less

than any other experience.

Gautama,

the Awakened One

or Buddha,

who died in 545 BC,

lived at a time

when the major Upanishads

were already in existence

and their philosophy

must be seen

as the point of departure

for his own teaching.

The Buddha was acting

in full accord

with this tradition

when he became a Rishi

or forest sage

who had abandoned

the life of the householder

and divested himself

of caste

in order to follow

a way of liberation.

For the Indian tradition,

even more than the Chinese,

specifically encourages

the abandonment

of the conventional life

at a certain age

after the duties of family

and citizenship

have been fulfilled.

Relinquishment of caste

is the outward

and visible sign

of the realization

that one's true state

is unclassified,

that one's role

or person

is simply conventional

and that one's true nature

is no thing

and no body.

This realization

was the crux

of the Buddha's experience

of awakening,

Bodhi,

which dawned upon him

one night

as he sat under

the celebrated

bow tree at Gaia

after seven years

of meditation

in the forests.

From the standpoint

of Zen,

this experience

is the essential content

of Buddhism

and the verbal doctrine

is quite secondary

to the wordless transmission

of the experience

from generation

to generation.

For seven years,

Gautama had struggled

by the traditional means

of yoga and tapas

to penetrate the cause

of man's enslavement

to Maya,

to find release

from the vicious circle

of clinging to life,

Trishna,

which is like trying

to make the hand

grasp itself.

All his efforts

had been in vain.

The eternal Atman,

the real self,

was not to be found.

However much

he concentrated

upon his own mind

to find its root

and ground,

he found only

his own effort

to concentrate.

The evening

before his awakening

he simply gave up,

relaxed his ascetic diet,

and ate some

nourishing food.

Thereupon he felt

at once

that a profound change

was coming over him.

He sat beneath the tree

vowing never to rise

until he had attained

the supreme awakening

and,

according to tradition,

sat all through the night

until the first glimpse

of the morning star

suddenly provoked

a state of perfect clarity

and understanding.

This was

Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi,

Unexcelled Complete Awakening,

Liberation from Maya

and from the everlasting

round of birth and death,

Samsara,

which goes on and on

for as long as a man

tries in any way

whatsoever

to grasp at his own life.

Yet the actual content

of this experience

was never

and could never

be put into words.

For words are the frames

of Maya,

the meshes of its net,

and the experience

is of the water

which slips through.

Thus,

so far as words

are concerned,

the most that may be said

of this experience

are the words

attributed to the Buddha

in the Vajra Kedika.

Quote,

Just so,

Suputi,

I obtained

not the least thing

from unexcelled

Complete Awakening

and for this very reason

it is called

unexcelled Complete Awakening.

Close quote.

Thus,

from the standpoint

of Zen,

the Buddha

never said a word,

despite the volumes

of scriptures

attributed to him.

For his real message

remained always unspoken

and was such

that when words

attempted to express it

they made it seem

as if it were nothing at all.

Yet it is the essential

tradition of Zen

that what cannot be

conveyed in speech

can nevertheless

be passed on

by direct pointing,

by some non-verbal

means of communication

without which

the Buddhist experience

could never

have been handed down

to future generations.

In its own tradition

Zen maintains

that the Buddha

transmitted awakening

to his chief disciple

Mahakasyapa

by holding up a flower

and remaining silent.

The traditional story

which the Zen school

gives of its own origin

is that it arrived

in China in 520

with the Indian monk

Bodhidharma,

28th of a somewhat

fanciful list

of Indian patriarchs

standing in a direct line

of apostolic succession

from Gautama.

Bodhidharma arrived in

Canton from India

and proceeded to the court

of Emperor Wu of Liang,

an enthusiastic patron

of Buddhism.

However, Bodhidharma's

doctrine and his abrupt

attitude did not appeal

to the emperor

so that he withdrew

for some years

to a monastery

in the state of Wei

and spent his time

gazing at the wall

until at last

he found a suitable

disciple who subsequently

became the second

patriarch of Zen

in China.

This man,

whose name was Eka,

he came to where

Bodhidharma was meditating

and said,

Master, I have no peace

of mind.

Please pacify my mind.

Because he didn't even

get in for a long time

to ask the question

because Bodhidharma

refused to see anybody.

Finally, when he cut off

his left arm

as a token of his sincerity

and presented it

to the master,

Bodhidharma said,

you know,

all right,

what do you want?

Well, he said,

I have no peace of mind.

So Bodhidharma said,

bring out your mind

here before me.

I'll pacify it.

And Eka said,

when I look for my mind,

I can't find it.

Bodhidharma said,

there, it's pacified.

Now, somehow,

this answered Eka's question.

And all Zen

is stories like that.

Now, one thing

I must tell you

about these stories.

They are of the same

nature as jokes.

And that is to say,

a joke is told

with the object

of making you laugh.

Laughter is not

an intellectual thing.

It is an emotional reaction.

And the point

is the emotional reaction.

If, therefore,

a joke is explained to you,

you may laugh

out of politeness,

a throaty laugh,

but you will not laugh

spontaneously,

a belly laugh.

Now, the object

of Zen stories

is not to produce laughter,

but to produce awakening.

Clarification,

enlightenment,

or what is called

in Japanese,

satori.

Satori is,

like laughter,

something that happens

suddenly.

You don't use a rule,

slowly begin to laugh,

and then laugh louder

and louder,

because you see

a joke instantly.

A joke is always

a matter of an aha.

So, in the same way,

these stories

are intended

to produce

an aha reaction

in you

of, oh,

but I see,

now it's clear.

And, really,

they don't contain

any information.

Their design

is not to tell you

something,

that is to say,

to impart

information or knowledge.

Their design

is to get rid

of something,

to get rid

of a false problem

with which you

are wrestling,

so that the problem

will disappear

as a result

of understanding

the story.

And you'll see

from the story

that I told you

that what happened

was the disappearance

of a problem,

because Eikar,

when he looked

for his mind

that was giving him

so much trouble,

couldn't find it.

The satori

which so frequently

follows these interchanges

is by no means

a mere comprehension

of the answer

to a riddle,

for whatever

the Zen master

says or does

is a direct

and spontaneous

utterance

of suchness,

of his Buddha nature,

and what he gives

is no symbol

but the very thing.

Zen communication

is always direct

pointing in line

with the traditional

four-phase summary

of Zen.

Outside teaching,

apart from tradition,

not founded

on words and letters,

pointing directly

to the human mind,

seeing into one's nature

and attaining Buddhahood.

The center

of Zen training

is to live

spontaneously,

and this is why

it's so fascinating

to many Western people,

especially Western

intellectuals,

who are overburdened

with self-consciousness.

Because what fascinated

people about Zen

when they first

heard of it

through Dr. Suzuki's

writings

was Zen stories.

I lent a book

of Zen stories

once to a friend

of mine,

years and years ago,

and he was in hospital.

And when he gave it

back to me,

he said,

gee, he said,

I didn't understand

a word of it,

but it cheered me up

enormously.

Almost all the literature

of the period

in early Buddhist Chinese

is anecdotes

about the encounters

of Zen masters

with their students.

They are called

in Japanese

mon-do,

which means

question-answer.

Now then,

these stories

go on

in the most

amazing ways.

And I might

retell a few,

although some of them

may be familiar to you.

I'll try and choose

ones that are

probably less familiar.

There was a

famous master

called Suibi,

and he was asked,

what is the

secret teaching

of Buddhism?

And he was asked

this in the lecture hall,

you know,

where other monks

were studying.

And he said,

wait till there's

no one around

and I'll tell you.

So later in the day,

the monk accosted him

and said,

there's nobody around now.

What is the

secret teaching

of Buddhism?

So he went

into the garden

with this monk

and he pointed

at the bamboos.

And the monk

said,

I don't understand.

He said,

what a tall one

that is.

What a short one

that is.

And this awakened

the monk.

The Chuan Teng Lu

records a fascinating

encounter between

Tao Zin

and the sage

Fa Jung,

who was so holy

that the birds

used to bring him

offerings of flowers.

As the two men

were talking,

a wild animal

roared close by

and Tao Zin

jumped.

Fa Jung commented,

I see it is still

with you,

referring,

of course,

to the instinctive

passion,

Klesa,

of fright.

Shortly afterwards,

while he was

for a moment

unobserved,

Tao Zin

wrote the Chinese

character for Buddha

on the rock

where Fa Jung

was accustomed to sit.

When Fa Jung

returned to sit down

again,

he saw the sacred

name and hesitated

to sit.

Then Tao Zin

said,

I see it is still

with you.

At this remark,

Fa Jung was fully

awakened,

and the birds

never brought

any more flowers.

The following story

is told of

Hui Zhang,

initiating into Zen

his great successor,

Ma Tzu,

who died in 788,

and was at the time

practicing sitting

meditation at the

monastery of

Chuan Fa.

Your reverence,

asked Huai Jing,

what is the objective

of sitting in meditation?

The objective,

answered Ma Tzu,

is to become a Buddha.

Thereupon,

Huai Chang picked up

a floor tile

and began to polish

it on a rock.

What are you doing,

Master?

said Ma Tzu.

I am polishing it

for a mirror,

said Hui Chang.

How could polishing

a tile make a mirror?

And Hui Chang replied,

how could sitting

in meditation

make a Buddha?

Ma Tzu

was the first

Zen master

celebrated for strange

words and extraordinary

behavior,

and is described

as one who walked

like a bull

and glared like a tiger.

He was the first

to answer questions

about Buddhism

by hitting the questioner

or by giving a

loud shout,

Ho!

Ma Tzu had a notable

disciple in Po Chang.

To Po Chang

is attributed

the famous definition

of Zen,

when hungry eat,

when tired sleep.

He is said

to have had his

Satori when Ma Tzu

shouted at him

and left him deaf

for three days

and to have been

in the habit

of pointing out

the Zen life

to his disciples

with the saying,

don't cling,

don't seek.

For when asked

about seeking

for the Buddha nature,

he answered,

it's much like

riding an ox

in search of the ox.

There was another

monk

whose name

was Gutte

and whenever people

came to ask him

questions about Buddhism

he would hold up

a finger.

That was the only

answer he would give.

Well, he had an

attendant

and one day

somebody came

to the temple

to inquire about

the teaching

being given there

and the master

was apparently out

and his attendant

was there.

actually,

the master

had been there.

He was peeking

from behind the screen

and so he came

out to this boy

and said,

what's the fundamental

teaching of Buddhism?

And the boy

held up a finger.

Instantly,

the master drew a knife

and cut it off

and the boy

was very dismayed

and rushed away

yelling.

So the master

said,

hey,

come back.

As he came back,

he said,

what's the fundamental

principle of Buddhism?

And he went

to hold up

the finger

and it wasn't there

and he was enlightened.

Empty and marvelous.

The opening words

of the oldest

Zen poem

say that

the perfect way

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

unfilled 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 Rinkushu 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.

When we are no longer identified with the idea of ourselves, the entire relationship between subject and

object, knower and known, undergoes a sudden and revolutionary change. It becomes a real relationship,

a mutuality in which the subject creates the object just as much as the object creates the subject.

The knower no longer feels himself to be independent of the known. The experiencer no longer feels himself

to stand apart from the experience. Consequently, the whole notion of getting something out of life,

of seeking something from experience, becomes absurd. To put it in another way, it becomes vividly clear

that in concrete fact I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.

This is the hua-yen doctrine of the net of jewels, of xi-xi-wu-ai, in which every jewel contains the

reflection of all the others. Man's identification with his idea of himself gives him a specious and

precarious sense of permanence, for this idea is relatively fixed, being based upon carefully

selected memories of his past, memories which have a preserved and fixed character. But to the degree

that he identifies himself with the fixed idea, he becomes aware of life as something which flows past

him, faster and faster as he grows older, as his idea becomes more rigid, more bolstered with memories.

The more he attempts to clutch the world, the more he feels it as a process in motion.

On one occasion, Matsu and Po Chang were out for a walk, when they saw some wild geese flying past.

What are they? asked Matsu. They're wild geese, said Po Chang. What are they doing? demanded Matsu.

Po Chang replied, they've already flown away. Suddenly Matsu grabbed Po Chang by the nose and twisted it

so that he cried out in pain. How, shouted Matsu, could they ever have flown away?

This was the moment of Po Chang's awakening. The relativity of time and motion is one of the

principal themes of Dogen's Shoubogenzu, where he writes,

If we watch the shore while we are sailing in a boat, we feel that the shore is moving. But if we look

nearer to the boat itself, we know then that it is the boat which moves. When we regard the universe

in confusion of body and mind, we often get the mistaken belief that our mind is constant.

But if we actually practice Zen and come back to ourselves, we see that this was wrong.

When firewood becomes ashes, it never returns to being firewood. But we should not take the view

that what is latterly ashes was formerly firewood. What we should understand is that,

according to the doctrine of Buddhism, firewood stays at the position of firewood. There are former and

later stages, but these stages are clearly cut. It is the same with life and death. Thus we say in

Buddhism that the unborn is also the undying. Life is a position of time. Death is a position of time.

They are like winter and spring, and in Buddhism we do not consider that winter becomes spring,

or that spring becomes summer. Dogen is here trying to express the strange sense of timeless

moments, which arises when one is no longer trying to resist the flow of events, the peculiar stillness

and the self-sufficiency of the succeeding instance when the mind is, as it were, going along with them,

and not trying to arrest them. The measuring of worth and success in terms of time, and the insistent

demand for assurances of a promising future make it impossible to live freely both in the present

and in the promising future when it arrives. For there is never anything but the present,

and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere. The Shobog Enzo says,

When a fish swims, he swims on and on, and there is no end to the water. When a bird flies,

he flies on and on, and there is no end to the sky. From the most ancient times, there was never a fish

who swam out of the water, nor a bird who flew out of the sky. Yet when the fish needs just a little

water, he uses just a little, and when he needs lots, he uses lots. Thus the tips of their heads

are always at the outer edge of their space. If ever a bird flies beyond that edge, he dies,

and so also with the fish. From the water the fish makes his life, and from the sky the bird. But this

life is made by the bird and the fish. At the same time, the bird and the fish are made by life.

Thus there are the fish, the water, and life, and all three create each other.

Yet if there were a bird who first wanted to examine the size of the sky,

or a fish who first wanted to examine the extent of the water, and then try to fly or to swim,

they will never find their own ways in the sky or the water.

This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going. It is a philosophy of not making where one

is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point of going.

The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really

exist. The good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the

morrow which never comes. For all these things are a deception of symbols pretending to be realities,

and to seek after them is like walking straight into a wall upon which some painter has, by the

convention of perspective, suggested an open passage. In short, Zen begins at the point where

there is nothing further to seek, nothing to be gained. Zen is most emphatically not to be regarded

as a system of self-improvement or a way of becoming a Buddha. In the words of Lin Chi,

if a man seeks the Buddha, that man loses the Buddha. For all ideas of self-improvement and of becoming

or getting something in the future relate solely to our abstract image of ourselves. To follow them is

to give ever more reality to that image. On the other hand, our true non-conceptual self is already

the Buddha and needs no improvement. In the course of time it may grow, but one does not blame an egg

for not being a chicken. Still less does one criticize a pig for having a shorter neck than a giraffe.

What is, therefore, to be gained from Zen is called wu-shi, or nothing special. For as the Buddha says,

I obtained not the least thing from unexcelled complete awakening, and for this very reason it is called

unexcelled complete awakening. The expression of wu-shi also has the sense of the perfectly natural and

unaffected, in which there is no fuss or business. The attainment of Satori is often suggested by the

old Chinese poem, Mount Lu in misty rain, the river Che at high tide. When I had not been there,

no rest from the pain of longing, I went there and returned. It was nothing special.

Mount Lu in misty rain, the river Che at high tide. According to the famous saying of Ching Yuan,

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and waters as waters.

When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not

mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance, I am at rest. For it's

just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.

The difficulty of Zen is, of course, to shift one's attention from the abstract to the concrete,

from the symbolic self to one's true nature. So long as we merely talk about it, so long as we turn

over ideas in our minds about symbol and reality, or keep repeating, I am not my idea of myself,

this is still mere abstraction. Zen created the method of direct pointing in order to escape from

this vicious circle, in order to thrust the real immediately to our notice. When reading a difficult

book, it is of no help to think, I should concentrate, for one thinks about concentration instead of what

the book has to say. Likewise, in studying or practicing Zen, it is of no help to think about Zen.

To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.

For this reason, the masters talk about Zen as little as possible, and throw its concrete reality

straight at us. This reality is the suchness of our natural non-verbal world. When Tung Shan was asked,

what is the Buddha? He answered, three pounds of flax. Upon this, Yuan Wu comments,

Various answers have been given by different masters to the question, what is the Buddha?

None, however, can excel Tung Shan's three pounds of flax, as regards its irrationality,

which cuts off all passage of speculation. The masters are resolute in cutting short all

theorizing and speculation about these answers. Direct pointing entirely fails in its intention

if it requires or stimulates any conceptual comment. Another master was having tea with two of his

students, when he suddenly tossed his fan to one of them, saying, what's this? The student opened it

and fanned himself. Not bad, was his comment. Now you, he went on, passing it to the other student,

who had once closed the fan and scratched his neck with it. This done, he opened it again,

placed a piece of cake on it, and offered it to the master. This was considered even better,

for when there are no names, the world is no longer classified in limits and bounds.

Professor Irving Lee of Northwestern University used to hold up a matchbox before his class,

asking, what's this? The students would usually drop squarely into the trap and say,

a matchbox. At this, Professor Lee would say, no, no, it's this, throwing the matchbox at the class and

adding, matchbox is a noise. Is this a noise? A Zen master might hold up his hand to someone insisting

that there are real differences in the world and say, without saying a word, point to the difference

between my fingers. At once it is clear that sameness and difference are abstractions. The

same would have to be said of all categorizations of the concrete world, even concrete itself, for

such terms as physical, material, objective, real, and existential, are simply abstract symbols.

Indeed, the more one tries to define them, the more meaningless they turn out to be.

In R. H. Blythe's arresting metaphor, when we were just about to swat 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 under foot 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 Tae 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 . 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 yung, which is

precisely what the Taoists 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 young 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-sin, or no thought, wu-nyen, and why the masters

demonstrate Zen by giving instantaneous and unpremeditated answers to questions.

Zen. When Yun-men was asked for the ultimate secret of Buddhism, he replied,

Dumpling! The attitude of wu-tsin is by no means an anti-intellectualist exclusion of thinking.

Wu-tsin 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 am 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 am 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 a 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 or 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 shi, 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're 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'd 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. All

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, slapped

the two hands together and rubbed them around and 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 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, too intellectual. 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 alright 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 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, your 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. You 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. Takwan 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 Jung

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, though 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.

Zen in the Arts

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 Sabro 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 seventeenth century, the Japanese had brought this wordless poetry to perfection

in the haiku, the poem of just seventeen 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 wu-shi, 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 sonomama,

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 acquire,

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 tokonoma,

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 Chanoo-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 wear 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 Chanoyu

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 Herrigel'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.

Herrigel spent almost five years trying to find the right way of releasing the bowstring,

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 taut 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 Wuxin and Wunyen, 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 would 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 Herrigal'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 Cha No Yu, 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 cha no yu 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.

Western thought has changed so rapidly in this century

that we are in a state of considerable confusion.

Familiar concepts of space, time, and motion,

of nature and natural law, of history and social change,

of human personality itself, have dissolved,

and we find ourselves adrift without landmarks

in a universe which more and more resembles the Buddhist principle

of the great void.

The various wisdoms of the West, religious, philosophical, and scientific,

do not offer much guidance to the art of living in such a universe,

and we find the prospects of making our way

in so trackless an ocean of relativity rather frightening.

For we are used to absolutes, to firm principles and laws

to which we can cling for spiritual and psychological security.

That may be why there is so much interest in a culturally productive way of life

which, for some fifteen hundred years, has felt thoroughly at home in the void,

and which not only feels no terror for it, but rather a positive delight.

To use its own words, the situation of Zen has always been

above, not a tile to cover the head,

below, not an inch of ground for the foot.

But the scientifically trained Westerner is a cautious and sceptical fellow

who likes to know what he is getting into.

This does not advocate importing Zen from the Far East,

for there it has become deeply involved with cultural institutions

which are quite foreign to us.

But there is no doubt that there are things which we can learn,

or unlearn, from Zen, and apply in our own way.

Historically, Zen may be regarded as the fulfillment

of long traditions of Indian and Chinese culture,

though it is actually much more Chinese than Indian,

and, since the twelfth century,

it has rooted itself deeply and most creatively

in the culture of Japan.

It is not a religion or philosophy,

it is not a psychology or a type of science,

it is rather an example of what is known in India and China

as a way of liberation,

and is as much Taoist as Buddhist.

Zen is a translation of the Sanskrit word dhyana,

pronounced chan in Chinese,

and zen in Japanese.

It is unfortunately untranslatable in English.

It designates a certain state of consciousness

that is sometimes called meditation,

but that won't do it all.

Contemplation isn't really the point,

and 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 a 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.

The Tao is a way of life.

The word Tao means the way,

the course of nature,

the flow of things.

And in order to understand this point of view,

we have to make a very, very radical adjustment

in our ordinary common sense.

Because Zen and Taoism in common

involve not a system of doctrine,

not a set of beliefs,

as we ordinarily understand religion.

They involve a transformation of your consciousness.

That is to say,

of the way in which you experience

your own existence at every moment.

One might say that the average individual,

not only in the West,

but also in the East,

has a feeling of himself

as separate from his surroundings,

from other people,

and from the Earth itself,

and from the space and the stars

and everything around the Earth.

He feels this in such a way

that it's expressed

in all the phrases of common speech.

We talk about coming into the world.

I came into this world.

As a matter of fact, you didn't.

You came out of it.

Just in the same way

as an apple comes out of an apple tree,

as an expression of the apple tree.

The world that we live in

and we experience

is not cut up

into things and events.

It all goes together

in the same way

that the bees and the flowers go together,

only we don't notice this.

We've got a way of thinking

which splits it all up.

And as a result of that,

we think of ourselves

and so feel ourselves

as if we were something separate

from the whole domain of nature.

And to make a long story short

and to tell you the whole point

right at the beginning,

the disciplines of Taoism

and of Zen

propose to change your consciousness

in such a way

that you will no longer feel

that you are an isolated unit

locked up inside a bag of skin,

but that you will actually experience

the fact that your real self,

the real you,

is everything that there is,

but concentrated

and expressing itself

at the point

called your physical organism.

We as individual organisms,

as what we call physical bodies,

we come and go

like leaves on a tree,

but there's the tree

and you are the tree.

In the saying of Jesus,

I am the vine,

you are the branches,

but that I am

before Abraham was,

I am

is the self

and it's what the Hindus

call the Brahman

and the Chinese call the Tao.

The Indian Buddhist origins of Zen.

Fundamental to the life

and thought of India

from the very earliest times

is the great mythological theme

of self-sacrifice,

whereby God gives birth

to the world

and whereby men,

following the divine pattern,

reintegrate themselves with God.

As Prajapati,

Vishnu or Brahma,

the Lord under many names,

creates the world

by an act of self-dismemberment

or self-forgetting,

whereby the one becomes many

and the single actor

plays innumerable parts.

The thousand heads,

eyes and feet

of the Purusha

are the members

of the human race

and other beings,

for the point is that

that which knows

in and through

every individual

is God himself,

the Atman

or self of the world.

Every life

is a part

or role

in which the mind

of God is absorbed,

somewhat as an actor

absorbs himself

in being Hamlet

and forgets

that in real life

he is Mr. Smith.

By the act

of self-abandonment,

God becomes

all beings.

It is important

to remember

that this picture

of the world

as the play,

Leela,

of God

is mythological

in form.

According to the myth,

the divine play

goes on

through endless cycles

of time,

through periods

of manifestation

and withdrawal

of the worlds.

The foregoing myth

is not the expression

of a formal philosophy,

but of an experience

or state of consciousness

which is called

moksha

or liberation.

It may be considered

as the discovery

of who or what

I am

when I am

no longer identified

with any role

or conventional definition

of my person.

Indian philosophy

does not describe

the content

of this discovery

except in mythological terms

using the phrase

I am Brahman

or

That Art Thou

to suggest

that self-knowledge

is a realization

of one's original identity

with God.

Moksha

is also understood

as liberation

from Maya,

one of the most important words

in Indian philosophy,

both Hindu

and Buddhist.

The manifold world

of facts and events

is said to be

Maya.

To say then

that the world

of facts and events

is Maya

is to say that

facts and events

are terms of measurement

rather than

realities of nature.

This point of view

is somewhat startling

and even quite hard

to understand

for those long accustomed

to think

that things,

facts and events

are the very building blocks

of the world,

the most solid

of solid realities.

Yet a proper understanding

of the Maya doctrine

is one of the most

essential prerequisites

for the study of Buddhism.

Buddhists prefer

to speak of reality

as non-dual

rather than one,

since the concept of one

must always be in relation

to that of many.

The doctrine of Maya

is therefore

a doctrine of relativity.

It is saying that

things, facts and events

are delineated

not by nature

but by human description

and that the way

in which we describe

or divide them

is relative

to our varying points of view.

In summary then,

the Maya doctrine

points out first

the impossibility

of grasping

the actual world

in the mind's net

of words and concepts

and second

the fluid character

of those very forms

which thought

attempts to define.

The world of facts

and events

is altogether

Nama,

abstract names

and Rupa,

fluid form.

It escapes both

the comprehension

of the philosopher

and the grasp

of the pleasure seeker

like water

from a clutching fist.

It is precisely

this realization

of the total

elusiveness

of the world

which lies

at the root

of Buddhism.

This is the special

shift of emphasis

which, more than

anything else,

distinguishes the

doctrine of the Buddha

from the teaching

of the Upanishads.

Gautama,

the Awakened One

or Buddha

lived at a time

when the major

Upanishads

were already in existence.

That was in the

6th century

and their philosophy

must be seen

as the point of departure

for his own teaching.

For seven years

Gautama had struggled

by the traditional means

of yoga and tapas,

contemplation and asceticism

to penetrate the cause

of man's enslavement

to Maya,

to find release

from the vicious circle

of clinging to life,

Krishna,

which is like

trying to make

the hand

grasp itself.

All his efforts

had been in vain.

The eternal Atman,

the real self,

was not to be found.

However much

he concentrated

upon his own mind

to find its root

and ground,

he found

only his own effort

to concentrate.

The evening

before his awakening

he simply gave up,

relaxed his ascetic diet

and ate some

nourishing food.

Thereupon

he felt at once

that a profound change

was coming over him.

He sat beneath

the bow tree,

vowing never to rise

until he had attained

the supreme awakening,

and according to a tradition

sat all through the night

until the first glimpse

of the morning star

suddenly provoked

a state of perfect clarity

and understanding.

This was his

Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi,

unexcelled,

complete awakening,

liberation from Maya

and from the everlasting

round of birth

and death,

samsara,

which goes on and on

for as long as a man

tries in any way

whatsoever

to grasp

at his own life.

The Buddha

set forth

his doctrine

in the form

of four noble truths.

The first truth

is concerned

with the problematic

word dukkha,

loosely translatable

as suffering,

which designates

the great disease

of the world

for which the Buddha's

method,

dharma,

is the cure.

This, however,

cannot be compressed

into the sweeping

assertion that

life is suffering.

The point is rather

that life as we usually

live it

is suffering,

or more exactly

is bedeviled

by the peculiar frustration

which comes from

attempting the impossible.

Perhaps, then,

frustration

is the best

equivalent of dukkha.

The second noble truth

relates to the cause

of frustration,

which is said

to be trishna,

clinging,

or grasping,

based on avidya,

which is ignorance

or unconsciousness.

Now, avidya

is the formal opposite

of awakening.

It is the state

of the mind

when hypnotized

or spellbound

by maya,

so that it mistakes

the abstract world

of things

and events

for the concrete

world of reality.

At a still deeper level

it is the lack

of self-knowledge,

lack of the realization

that all grasping

turns out

to be the futile effort

to grasp oneself,

or rather,

to make life

catch hold of itself.

The third noble truth

is concerned

with the ending

of self-frustration,

of grasping,

and of the whole

viciously circular

pattern of karma

which generates

the round.

The ending of karma

is called nirvana.

Nirvana

could be described

as desperation.

It is the act

of one

who has seen

the futility

of trying to hold

his breath or life,

prana,

indefinitely,

since to hold

the breath

is to lose it.

Thus, nirvana

is the equivalent

of moksha,

release or liberation.

Nirvana is the way

of life which ensues

when clutching

at life

has come to an end.

To attain nirvana

is also to attain

buddhahood,

awakening.

But this is not

attainment

in any ordinary sense

because no acquisition

and no motivation

are involved.

It is impossible

to desire nirvana

or to intend

to reach it

for anything

desirable

or conceivable

as an object of action

is, by definition,

not nirvana.

Nirvana can only

arise unintentionally,

spontaneously,

when the impossibility

of self-grasping

has been thoroughly

perceived.

The fourth noble truth

describes the

eightfold path

of the Buddha's dharma,

that is,

the method or doctrine

whereby self-frustration

is brought to an end.

The first two sections

have to do with thought,

the following four

have to do with action

and the final two

have to do with

contemplation or awareness.

The four sections

dealing with action

are often misunderstood

because they have

a deceptive similarity

to a system of morals.

Buddhism does not share

the Western view

that there is a moral law

enjoined by God

or by nature

which it is one's duty

to obey.

The Buddha's precepts

of conduct,

abstinence from taking life,

taking what is not given,

exploitation of the passions,

lying and intoxication,

are voluntarily assumed

rules of expediency,

the intent of which

is to remove the hindrances

to clarity,

to awareness.

Failure to observe the precepts

produces bad karma,

not because karma is a law

or moral retribution,

but because all motivated

and purposeful actions,

whether conventionally good

or bad,

are karma insofar

as they are directed

to the grasping of life.

Generally speaking,

the conventionally bad actions

are rather more grasping

than the good,

but the higher stages

of Buddhist practice

are as much concerned

with disentanglement

from good karma

as from bad.

Thus, complete action

is ultimately free,

uncontrived,

or spontaneous action

in exactly the same sense

as the Taoist

Wu Wei.

This means

not to force things.

That's the best

English translation

I've come to see.

It's sometimes translated

not doing,

no artificiality,

no interference,

but our word forcing

as when a forced laugh,

forcing a lock,

forced behavior,

forced kindness,

forced love,

in that sense forcing,

don't force it.

So,

it means action

in accordance

with the character

of the moment

and of the circumstances

in which you're acting.

You see,

you can't not interfere

with the world.

Everything you do

interferes

with your environment.

To know things

is to change them.

You cannot not interfere.

So,

the idea is

to learn

how to interfere

skillfully.

That's meaning

of Wu Wei.

Smriti,

recollectedness,

and samadhi,

contemplation,

constitute the section

dealing with

the life of meditation,

the inner,

mental practice

of the Buddha's way.

Complete recollectedness

is a constant awareness

or watching

of one's sensations,

feelings,

and thoughts

without purpose

or comment.

It is a total clarity

and presence of mind,

actively passive,

wherein events

come and go

like reflections

on a mirror.

Nothing is reflected

except what is.

Through such awareness

it is seen

that the separation

of the thinker

from the thought,

the knower

from the known,

the subject

from the object

is purely abstract.

There is not

the mind

on the one hand

and its experiences

on the other.

There is just

a process

of experiencing

in which there is

nothing to be grasped

as an object

and no one

as a subject

to grasp it.

Seen thus,

the process

of experiencing

ceases to clutch

at itself.

Thought follows thought

without interruption,

that is,

without any need

to divide itself

from itself

so as to become

its own object.

The non-duality

of the mind

in which it is

no longer divided

against itself

is Samadhi

and because of

the disappearance

of that fruitless

threshing around

of the mind

to grasp itself,

Samadhi is a state

of profound peace.

This is not

the stillness

of total inactivity

for once the mind

returns to its natural state

Samadhi persists

at all times

in walking,

standing,

sitting and lying.

But from the earliest times

Buddhism has especially

emphasized the practice

of recollectedness

and contemplation

while sitting.

Most images

of the Buddha

show him in the posture

of sitting meditation,

the posture

of the lotus,

with the legs crossed

and the feet resting,

soles upward

upon the thighs.

Sitting meditation

is not,

as is often supposed,

a spiritual exercise,

a practice followed

for some ulterior object.

From a Buddhist standpoint,

it is simply

the proper way to sit

and it seems

perfectly natural

to remain sitting

so long as there

is nothing else

to be done

and so long

as one is not consumed

with nervous agitation.

To the restless temperament

of the West,

sitting meditation

may seem to be

an unpleasant discipline

because we do not

seem to be able

to sit,

just to sit,

without qualms

of conscience,

without feeling

that we ought to be

doing something

more important

to justify our existence.

Because the teaching

of the Buddha

was a way of liberation,

it had no other object

than the experience

of nirvana.

The Buddha did not

attempt to set forth

a consistent philosophical system

trying to satisfy

that intellectual curiosity

about ultimate things

which expects answers

in words.

When pressed

for such answers,

when questioned

about the nature

of nirvana,

the origin of the world

and the reality

of the self,

the Buddha maintained

a noble silence

and went on to say

that such questions

were irrelevant

and did not lead

to the actual experience

of liberation.

It has often been said

that the later development

of Buddhism

was due to the inability

of the Indian mind

to rest content

with that silence,

so that at last

it had to indulge

its overwhelming urge

for abstract

metaphysical speculations

about the nature

of reality.

There are two sets

of Buddhist scriptures,

the Pali canon

of the southern school

of Buddhism,

which flourishes

in Ceylon,

Burma and Thailand

and the Sanskrit

Tibetan-Chinese canon

of the Mahayana

or northern school.

The vast body

of Mahayana doctrine

arose not so much

to satisfy

intellectual curiosity

as to deal

with the practical,

psychological problems

encountered

in following

the Buddha's way.

Certainly,

the treatment

of these problems

is highly scholastic

and the intellectual

level of the Mahayana

texts is very lofty.

But the consistent aim

is to bring about

the experience

of liberation,

not to construct

a philosophical system.

The great concern

of the Mahayana

is the provision

of skillful means,

upaya,

for making nirvana

accessible

to every type

of mentality.

These skillful means

range from

the sophisticated dialectic

of Nagarjuna,

whose object

is to free the mind

of all fixed conceptions,

to the pure land

doctrine of liberation

through simply repeating

the name of Amitabha.

They even include

the tantric Buddhism

of medieval India,

where liberation

may be realized

through the repetition

of sacred words

and formulae

called dharani,

and through special

types of yoga

involving sexual intercourse

with a shakti

or spiritual wife.

No one has been able

to find any trace

of a specific

dhyana school

in Indian Buddhism.

However,

it is not really necessary

to suppose that there

was ever a specific

dhyana school in India.

The creation of Zen

would seem to be

sufficiently explained

by the exposure

of Taoists and Confucians

to the main principles

of Mahayana Buddhism.

Therefore,

the appearance of trends

very close to Zen

can be seen

almost as soon

as the great

Mahayana sutras

became available

in China.

Buddhism came to China

about the year 400.

A very great

Sanskrit scholar

by the name of

Kumara Jiva

came and started

teaching Chinese

scholars Sanskrit.

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.

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.

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

Eka.

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,

you see,

to come back

stronger.

I mean,

if you're going to

learn at all.

And Eka

came back

stronger and

Bodhidharma

resisted him

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.

In

Chinese,

mind is

this word

pronounced

shin,

and shin

is here.

Shin is the

heart-mind,

it's the

psychic center.

And so

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 all

the thing

was about.

That's the

experience

called

satori

in Japanese,

wu

in Chinese,

Mandarin,

and in the

Cantonese

dialect,

it's just

what we

call in

our

modern

psychological

jargon,

the

aha

phenomenon.

The

aha

phenomenon.

Aha!

Now I

see.

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

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

in

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

flood

light.

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

conscious

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.

Being

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.

When

we

turn

to

ancient

Chinese

society

we

find

two

philosophical

traditions

playing

complementary

parts

Confucianism

and

Taoism.

According

to

tradition

the

originator

of

Taoism

Lao

Tse

was

an

older

contemporary

of

Confucius.

Lao Tse

is said

to have

been

the

author

of

the

Tao

Te

Ching

a

short

book

of

aphorisms

setting

forth

the

principles

of

the

and its power of virtue, day. But traditional Chinese philosophy ascribes

both Daoism and Confucianism to a still earlier source, to a work which lies at

the very foundation of Chinese thought and culture, dating anywhere from 3000 to 1200 BC.

This is the I Ching, the Book of Changes. The I Ching is ostensibly a book of

divination. It consists of oracles based on 64 abstract figures, each of which is

composed of six lines. The lines are of two kinds, divided or negative and

undivided or positive, and the six line figures or hexagrams are believed to

have been based on the various ways in which a tortoise shell will crack when

heated. But an expert in the I Ching need not necessarily use tortoise shells or

yarrow stalks. He can see a hexagram in anything, in the chance arrangement of a

bowl of flowers, in objects scattered upon a table, in the natural markings on a

pebble. A modern psychologist will recognize in this something not unlike a

Rorschach test, in which the psychological condition of a patient is diagnosed

from the spontaneous images that the patient sees in a complex inkblot. On the

other hand, we feel that we decide rationally because we base our decisions on

collecting relevant data about the matter in hand. We do not depend upon such

irrelevant trifles as the chance tossing of a coin, or the patterns of tea

leaves, or cracks in a shell. We go through the motions of gathering the

necessary information in a rational way, and then, just because of a hunch, or

because we are tired of thinking, or because the time has come to decide, we act. By

far, the greater part of our important decisions depend upon hunch, in other

words, upon the peripheral vision of the mind. Thus, the reliability of our

decisions rests, ultimately, upon our ability to feel the situation, upon the

degree to which this peripheral vision has been developed. Every exponent of the

I Ching knows this. He knows that the book itself does not contain an exact

science, but rather a useful tool which will work for him if he has a good

intuition, or if, as he would say, he is in the Tao. The I Ching had given the

Chinese mind some experience in arriving at decisions spontaneously, decisions

which are effective to the degree that one knows how to let one's mind alone,

trusting it to work by itself. This is Wu Wei, since Wu means not or non, and Wei

means action, making, doing, striving, straining, or busyness. To return to the

illustration of eyesight, the peripheral vision works most effectively, as in the

dark, when we see out of the corners of the eyes, and do not look at things

directly. Similarly, when we need to see the details of a distant object, such as a

clock, the eyes must be relaxed, not staring, not trying to see. So, too, no amount of

working with the muscles of the mouth and tongue will enable us to taste our food

more acutely. The eyes and the tongue must be trusted to do the work by

themselves. The mental or psychological equivalent of this is the special kind of

stupidity to which Lao Tse and Chuan Tse so often refer. It is not simply calmness of mind,

but non-graspingness of mind. Wu Xin, literally, no mind, which is to say,

un-self-consciousness. It is a state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily.

It has been well said that Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export. So one might say simply this,

to try and sum up what Buddhism is about. The word Buddha is derived from the root

Buddha in Sanskrit, B-U-D-H, 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,

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. 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

Sakaya Drishti, the view of separateness. And a Buddha is one who has overcome that.

So the method of Buddhism, what'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, or at one extreme,

or a logical positivist at the other, both are clinging to something. You see? 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.

So this is what Buddhism does. When it says it's the art of let go of non-attachment. Non-attachment

doesn't mean that you lose your appetite for dinner. It means simply that you stop grabbing.

Zen developed in China after Bodhidharma's time and came to a sort of golden age in the Tang and

Song dynasties. In the year 845 there was a brief but vigorous persecution of Buddhism by the Daoist

Emperor Wu Tsung. Temples and monasteries were destroyed, lands confiscated, and the monks compelled

to return to lay life. Fortunately, his enthusiasm for Daoist alchemy soon involved him in experiments

with the elixir of immortality, and from partaking of this concoction he shortly died. Zen had survived

the persecution better than any other school, and now entered a long era of imperial and popular favor.

Hundreds of monks thronged its wealthy monastic institutions, and the fortunes of the school so

prospered and its numbers so increased that the preservation of its spirit became a very serious problem.

The solution was the system of the kung-an, Japanese koan, or zen problem.

Literally, this term means a public document, or case, in the sense of a decision creating a legal precedent.

Thus the koan system involves passing a series of tests based on the mondo, or anecdotes, of the old masters.

The Rinzai school has always forbidden the publication of formally acceptable answers to the various koans,

because the whole point of the discipline is to discover them for oneself by intuition.

To know the answers without having so discovered them would be like studying the map without taking the journey.

Lacking the actual shock of recognition, the bare answers seem flat and disappointing,

and obviously no competent master would be deceived by anyone who gave them without genuine feeling.

The study of zen in the Rinzai school proceeds through six stages.

The first five stages consist of passing a graduated series of approximately 50 koan problems.

The sixth stage is a study of the Buddhist precepts and the regulations of the monk's life,

Vinaya, in the light of zen understanding.

Normally this course of training takes about 30 years.

By no means all zen monks complete the whole training.

This is required only of those who are to receive their master's Inka, or seal of approval,

so that they themselves may become masters, Roshi, thoroughly versed in all the skillful means,

upaya, for teaching zen to others.

Like so many other things of this kind, the system is as good as one makes it,

and its graduates are both tall Buddhas and short Buddhas.

It should not be assumed that a person who has passed a koan, or even many koan,

is necessarily a transformed human being whose character and way of life are radically different

from what they were before.

Nor should it be assumed that Satori, enlightenment, is a single sudden leap from the common consciousness

to complete, unexcelled awakening, Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi.

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 one 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 a kind of knack for understanding the zen style of handling Buddhist principles.

To the normal Asian concept of the master-pupil relationship,

Zen adds something of its own in the sense that it leaves the formation of the relationship

entirely to the initiative of the pupil.

The basic position of Zen is that it has nothing to say, nothing to teach.

The truth of Buddhism is so self-evident, so obvious, that it is, if anything, concealed by explaining it.

Therefore, the master does not help the student in any way, since helping would actually be hindering.

On the contrary, he goes out of his way to put obstacles and barriers in the student's path.

The preliminary hosh-shin type of koan begins, therefore, to obstruct the student by sending

him off in the direction exactly opposite to that in which he should look.

Only it does it rather cleverly, so as to conceal the stratagem.

Everyone knows that the Buddha nature is within oneself, and is not to be sought outside,

so that no student would be fooled by being told to seek it by going to India,

or by reading a certain sutra. On the contrary, he is told to look for it in himself.

Worse still, he is encouraged to seek it with the whole energy of his being,

never giving up his quest by day or night, whether actually in Zazen or whether working or eating.

He is encouraged, in fact, to make a total fool of himself,

to whirl around and around like a dog trying to catch up with its own tail.

Commonly, then, a first koan given to a student might be Hui Neng's original face,

Chao Chu's Wu, or Hakuin's one hand. At the first San Zen interview, the Roshi instructs

the reluctantly accepted student to discover his original face or aspect, that is, his basic nature,

as it was before his father and mother conceived him. When the beginning koan is Chao Chu's Wu,

the student is asked to find out why Chao Chu answered Wu, or none to the question,

does a dog have the Buddha nature? The Roshi asks to be shown this nothing. A Chinese proverb says

that a single hand does not make a clap, and therefore Hakuin asks, what is the sound of one

hand clapping? Can you hear what is not making a noise? Can you get any sound out of this one object

which has nothing to hit? Can you get any knowledge of your own real nature? What an idiotic question!

By such means the student is at last brought to a point of feeling completely stupid, as if he were

encased in a huge block of ice, unable to move or think. He just knows nothing. After some time in

this state there comes a moment when the block of ice suddenly melts, when this vast lump of

unintelligibility comes instantly alive. The problem of who or what it is becomes transparently absurd,

a question which from the beginning meant nothing whatever. There is no one left to ask himself

the question or to answer it. In this state the Roshi needs only a single look at the student

to know that he is now ready to begin his Zen training in earnest.

It is not quite the paradox which it seems to say that Zen training can begin only when it has been

finished, for this is simply the basic Mahayana principle that Prajna leads to Karuna, that awakening

is not truly attained unless it also implies the life of the Bodhisattva, the manifestation of the

marvelous use of the void for the benefit of all sentient beings. At this point the Roshi begins to

present the student with koan which asks for impossible feats of action or judgment, such as

Take the four divisions of Tokyo out of your sleeve. Stop that ship on the distant ocean.

Stop the booming of the distant bell. A girl is crossing the street. Is she the younger or the older

sister? Such koan are rather more obviously tricky than the basic introductory problems, and show the

student that what are dilemmas for thought present no barriers to action. A paper handkerchief easily

becomes the four divisions of Tokyo, and the student solves the problem of the younger or older sister

by mincing across the room like a girl. For in her absolute suchness the girl is just that.

She is only relatively sister, older or younger. The continued practice of Zazen now provides the

student with a clear unobstructed mind into which he can toss the koan like a pebble into a pool and simply

watch to see what his mind does with it. As the work goes on, crucial koan alternate with subsidiary

koan which explore the implications of the former and give the student a thorough working acquaintance

with every theme in the Buddhist view of the universe, presenting the whole body of understanding

in such a way that he knows it in his bones and in his nerves. By such means he learns to respond with

it instantly and unwaveringly in the situations of everyday life. Koan training comes to its conclusion

in the stage of perfect naturalness of freedom in both the absolute and the relative worlds. However,

because this freedom is not opposed to the conventional order, but is rather a freedom which upholds the

world, loka samgara. The final phase of study is the relationship of Zen to the rules of social and

monastic life. The koan system was developed in the Lin Chi, Rinzai school of Zen, but not without

opposition. The Soto school felt that it was much too artificial. Whereas the koan advocates used this

technique as a means for encouraging that overwhelming feeling of doubt, I Ching, which they felt to be

essential as a prerequisite for Satori, the Soto school argued that it lent itself too easily

to that very seeking for Satori which thrusts it away, or what is worse, induces an artificial Satori.

To say that the koan system has certain dangers or drawbacks is only to say that anything can be

misused. One drawback can arise from the opposition of Satori to the intense feeling of doubt which some

koan exponents so deliberately encourage. For this is to foster a dualistic Satori. To say that the depth

of the Satori is proportional to the intensity of seeking and striving which precede it is to confuse

Satori with its purely emotional adjuncts. In other words, if one wants to feel exhilaratingly light-footed,

it is always possible to go around for some time with lead in one's shoes and then take them off.

The sense of relief will certainly be proportional to the length of time

such shoes have been worn and to the weight of the lead.

This is equivalent to the old trick of religious revivalists who give their followers a tremendous

emotional uplift by first implanting an acute sense of sin and then relieving it through faith in Jesus.

But such uplifts do not last. For the Soto school, this suggests that such a Satori

has a dualistic character and is thus no more than an artificial emotional reaction.

Thus the Soto view was that proper dhyana lay in motiveless action, wu-wei, in sitting just to sit or

walking just to walk. The two schools, therefore, came to be known respectively as Kan Hua Zen,

observing the anecdote Zen, and Mo Chao Zen, silently illumined Zen.

The Rinzai school of Zen was introduced into Japan in 1191 by the Japanese monk Eisai. The Soto school

was introduced in 1227 by the extraordinary genius Dogen. Both Rinzai and Soto Zen, as we find them in

Japanese monasteries today, put enormous emphasis on Zazen, or sitting meditation, a practice which they

follow for many hours of the day, attaching great importance to the correctness of posture and the way

of breathing which it involves. To practice Zen in Japan today is, to all intents and purposes,

to practice Zazen. It may seem both strange and unreasonable that strong and intelligent people

should simply sit for hours on end. The Western mentality feels that such things are not only

unnatural, but a great waste of valuable time, however useful as a discipline for inculcating

patience and fortitude. Although the West has its own contemplative tradition in the Catholic Church,

the life of sitting and looking has lost its appeal, for no religion is valued which does not

improve the world, and it is hard to see how the world can be improved by sitting still. Yet it should

be obvious that action without wisdom, without clear awareness of the world as it really is,

can never improve anything. Furthermore, just as muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone,

it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best

contributions to a world in turmoil. In the Sodo or Zendo, the monks hall or meditation hall of a Zen

community, there is of course nothing particularly distracting in the external surroundings.

There is a long room with wide platforms down either side where the monks both sleep and meditate.

The platforms are covered with tatami, thick floor mats of straw, and the monks sit in two rows

facing one another across the room. The silence which prevails is deepened rather than broken by

occasional sounds that float up from a nearby village, by the intermittent ringing of soft-toned bells

from other parts of the monastery, and by the chatter of birds in the trees. Other than this,

there is only the feel of the cold, clear mountain air and the woody smell of a special kind of incense.

Much importance is attached to the physical posture of Zazen. The monks sit on firmly padded cushions,

with legs crossed and feet soles upward upon the thighs. The hands rest upon the lap,

the left over the right, with palms upward and thumbs touching one another. The body is held erect,

though not stiffly erect, and the eyes are left open so that their gaze falls upon the floor

a few feet ahead. The breathing is regulated so as to be slow without strain, with the stress upon the

out-breath, and its impulse from the belly rather than the chest. This has the effect of shifting the

body's centre of gravity to the abdomen, so that the whole posture has a sense of firmness,

of being part of the ground upon which one is sitting. The slow, easy breathing from the belly

works upon the consciousness like bellows, and gives it a still, bright clarity. The beginner is

advised to accustom himself to the stillness by doing nothing more than counting his breaths,

from one to ten, over and over again, until the sensation of sitting without comment becomes

effortless and natural. While the monks are thus seated, two attendants walk slowly back and forth

along the floor between the platforms, each carrying a kesaku, or warning stick, round at one end and

flattened at the other, a symbol of the Bodhisattva Manjusri's sword of Prajna. As soon as they see a monk going

to sleep, or sitting in an incorrect posture, they stop before him, bow ceremoniously, and beat him on

the shoulders. It is said that this is not punishment, but an invigorating massage to take the stiffness

out of the shoulder muscles and bring the mind back to a state of alertness. However, monks with

whom I have discussed this practice seem to have the same wryly humorous attitude about it which one

associates with the usual corporal disciplines of boys' boarding schools. Furthermore, the Sodo

regulations say, at the time of morning service the dozing ones are to be severely dealt with the

kesaku. At intervals the sitting posture is interrupted and the monks fall into ranks for a

swift march around the floor between the platforms to keep themselves from sluggishness. The periods of

zazen are also interrupted for work in the monastery grounds, cleaning the premises, services in the main

shrine or Buddha hall, and other duties as well as for meals and short hours of sleep. At certain times

of year, zazen is kept up almost continuously from 3.30 a.m. until 10 p.m., and these long periods are

called seshin, or collecting the mind. Every aspect of the monks' lives is conducted according to a precise,

though not ostentatious, ritual which gives the atmosphere of the Sodo a slightly military air.

The rituals are signaled and accompanied by about a dozen different kinds of bells, clappers,

and wooden gongs, struck in various rhythms to announce the times for zazen, meals, services,

lectures, or sanzen interviews with the master. Mature western students who discover an interest in

zen as a philosophy will find that zen is a discipline enforced with a big stick. They will

find that although it is still an effective way of liberation at its upper end, its main preoccupation

is with a disciplinary regimen which trains character in the same way as the old-fashioned

British public school or the Jesuit novitiate trained character. Now people who go to Japan

to study zen have read about it in the writings of Suzuki and R.H. Blythe and myself,

and very often they're in for a curious shock. They suppose that zen people are kind of quakerish,

and they are shocked to find that procedures in a zen monastery and zen temples are highly ritualistic,

that the temple buildings and grounds are positively sumptuous, and that zen

is existing in terms of a big ecclesiastical organization.

Most of the monks in the monasteries are the sons of priests. You see, a zen monastery is a seminary more

than a monastery. It's a training school. It isn't a monastery in our sense where you take life vows and

you enter into the monastery for your whole life with the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. It's a training

school from which you graduate in due course when the teacher thinks you're ready. When you've taken the

training, there are various options open to you, and the usual one is to become a temple priest.

Every zen monastery stands in the middle of an enormous campus. There is the training center,

and then surrounding it, ever so many separate buildings, which are individual temples.

And these temples were originally built by wealthy patrons of the monastery

to provide a place where a priest would, for all time, chant sutras for the future

assistance of the wealthy patron through his future incarnations. Occasionally they will take a few

students for meditation, but by and large the zen priest is a sutra chanter, and this is true of almost

all Buddhist priests, serving the community in much the same way as a catholic priest serves a parish.

But you see, these temples are passed down in the family from father to son.

So my oldest son should take over the temple from me if I'm a priest. So I say, you go to this,

to the zen monastery, and you train there until the teacher says you're ready, and then you can come back

and help me out around the temple, and when I die or retire you take it over. So most of the boys,

and they are boys, many of them just out of high school, the boys in there are not really there because

they have a strong vocation for it. They are there because they've been sent there through parental authority.

And therefore it is not surprising that their attitude to zen is rather mechanical.

I notice this more in the Soto sect than in the Rinzai sect, but to a great extent it is a kind of

mechanical existence. They are going through a prolonged hazing process, as it were, in order to be fit

to take over father's job, and to have zen style. Zen style is very important. Just as we train physicians

to have a good bedside manner, or a priest to behave as a priest in the style of a priest, and that carries

with it a certain aura of tradition and authority and conviction. And so these boys are trained very

carefully to walk, to carry themselves, to speak and behave according to zen style. And it's very pleasant.

I must say, they are very presentable people. They are unlike ordinary Japanese people, in that they're not nervous.

They don't giggle when embarrassed. It's difficult to embarrass them. And occasionally, every now and then,

one of them turns out to be an enthusiast, and really gets through with zen. But by and large, I'm sorry to say,

that in both the Rinzai and the Soto schools, a large number of products are graduated, who really have no

feeling for zen, who never quite got the point, but manage to struggle through the motions. And thus, there are increasingly few

great teachers of zen in the country. There is, however, an awakening going on, and times are beginning to change,

and to a great extent, this is the result of the Western interest in zen. As a matter of fact, this sort of revival

is true all over Asia. If you read a book by Ernst Benz called Buddhism or Communism, it's very fascinating.

And he shows to what extent there has been a Buddhist revival in Asia through Western intervention, interest,

and so on. And this is particularly true in Japan. But the real struggle and the real problem is this.

The younger generation in Japan is not interested in Buddhism, period. If you ask a Japanese, say roughly between

30 and 40, what's your religion? He's apt to say, my parents are Buddhists. As for himself, he has no interest,

and he knows nothing about it. When they hear Sutra chanting...

...

They think, oh, what a bore.

Nobody understands it anyway because the sutras are chanted in Sino-Japanese.

That is to say, it is a peculiar Japanese way of pronouncing Chinese.

It is not the Japanese way of pronouncing Japanese.

And so nobody knows what it's about.

Most of the people who are chanting don't know what it's about.

And of course some of it, insofar as it's what's called dharani, didn't mean anything in the first place.

And so they have this modern feeling, what does it all mean?

Second generation Japanese in the United States can't stand it when the priests chant a sutra to pacify the old folks.

They want the whole thing changed.

And they sing in the Buddhist churches in the United States.

Buddha loves me, this I know, for the sutra tells me so.

They have Sunday school and everything, they organize just like a Protestant church.

Because the Nisei and the Sansei, second and third generation Japanese, want to slip into the American scene.

And unlike the Chinese who are very retentive of their culture, the Japanese settlers here seem to want to lose it and become Rotarian.

And so in Japan today, much the same situation prevails.

There is an extraordinary outbreak of new religions, which we would hear would call cults, like Tenrikyu and so on.

But so far as Buddhism is concerned, the younger generation couldn't care less.

And that's why, you see, the only young people who frequent the temples, by and large, are priests' sons.

So there is this tremendous problem of, unless the Buddhist tradition is to go down the drain completely,

of re-familiarizing the Japanese with what it's all about.

So either the modern Japanese are going to let the whole thing go down the drain,

or else somehow it's got to be re-presented to them in a modern idiom.

They wake up and realize that they have a treasure.

When one has learned to let one's mind alone, so that it functions in the integrated and spontaneous way that is natural to it,

one begins to show the special kind of virtue, or power, called Dei.

A profound regard for Dei underlies the entire higher culture of the Far East,

so much so that it has been made the basic principle of every kind of art and craft.

While it is true that these arts employ what are to us highly difficult technical disciplines,

it is always recognized that they are instrumental and secondary,

and that the superior work has the quality of an accident.

This is not merely a masterful mimicry of the accidental, an assumed spontaneity in which the careful planning does not show.

It lies at a much deeper and more genuine level.

For what the culture of Daoism and Zen proposes is that one might become the kind of person who,

without intending it, is a source of marvelous accidents.

One occasionally encounters a Zen practice which stresses the use of one's ordinary work as the means of meditation.

This principle underlies the common use of such arts as tea ceremony, flute playing, brush drawing,

archery, fencing, and jiu-jitsu as ways of practicing Zen.

One of the great applications of Zen was to the art of fencing.

And when you learn fencing, you see you have to learn to be spontaneous,

because here of all places it is true that he who hesitates is lost.

If you're engaged in combat, you see, and you stop to think what sort of a defense or attack you ought to make,

the enemy's got you.

So the way they teach people spontaneity in fencing is very interesting.

When you start into fencing school, you of course live with the teacher.

He has a kind of ashram.

But you're given a janitorial job.

You clean up, you wash dishes, you put bedding away, and things like that.

While you're going about your daily business, the master surprises you with a practice sword,

which is made of four strips of bamboo rather loosely tied together.

And he hits you with this, surprisingly and suddenly, from nowhere.

And you are expected to defend yourself with anything available.

With the bedding, with the broom, with the pots and pans, just anything to defend.

But the poor student never knows when the attack is coming,

or where, what direction it's coming from.

And he begins to get tense.

And he begins to go around everywhere on the sort of alert, you see, watching,

watching which direction it's coming from.

And as he goes down a certain passage, feeling that the master is probably lurking around that corner,

and he's all set to go for him with that, that he gets that practice sword,

he suddenly gets hit from behind.

So eventually, he gives up.

There's absolutely no way of preparing for the attack.

And so he just wanders around, feeling, well, if it hits, it's going to hit.

And then he's ready to begin fencing.

Because if you prepare for an attack from a specific direction,

and it comes from some other direction, you have to withdraw from the direction in which you had expected it,

and send your energy in another direction, and that takes time.

So what you do is, you go around with a mind of no expectation.

That is called, uh, Mushin, or Munen.

This is a very important Zen expression.

You could also call it, no heart.

Because the character Shin means both heart and mind,

but it isn't quite the same as our word heartless, as we use it,

and it isn't the same as the word mindless, as we use it, meaning stupid.

To be in the state of Mushin is to have a mind like a mirror.

And of this, the Taoist sage Zhuangzi said,

the perfect man employs his mind as a mirror.

It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing, it receives but does not keep.

And when anything comes in front of a mirror, it reflects it instantly.

The mirror doesn't wait to reflect it.

And this is also likened to a vessel of water, like a wooden barrel.

When you make a hole in the barrel, the water instantly flows out of the hole.

Because the water is always available to come out.

It doesn't have to choose.

And so you could also say that Mushin is what Krishnamurti calls choicelessness.

To be or not to be, that is the question.

But there is no question about to be or not to be.

See, because to be and not to be go together, as we saw, they arise mutually.

Bowmen and swordsmen, trained by quite other methods, can equal the feats of Zen-inspired samurai.

But so far as Zen is concerned, the end results have nothing to do with it.

For as we have seen all along, Zen has no goal.

It is a traveling without point, with nowhere to go.

To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.

For as our own proverb says, to travel well is better than to arrive.

A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them,

a world which values only getting somewhere as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance.

One can get anywhere and everywhere, and yet the more this is possible,

the less is anywhere and everywhere worth getting to.

And it is all very much like eating the precise ends of a banana without getting what lies in between.

The point, therefore, of these arts is the doing of them rather than the accomplishment.

But more than this, the real joy of them lies in what turns up unintentionally in the course of practice.

Planned surprises are as much of a contradiction as intentional satori,

and whoever aims at satori is, after all, like a person who sends himself Christmas presents

for fear that others will forget him.

One must simply face the fact that Zen is all that side of life which is completely beyond our control,

and which will not come to us by any amount of forcing,

or wangling, or cunning stratagems which produce only fakes of the real thing.

But the last word of Zen is not an absolute dualism,

the rather barren world of controlled action on the one side,

and the spontaneous world of uncontrolled surprise on the other.

There was, for example, a great Zen monk, who lived shortly after 1000 AD,

who had a very peculiar way of painting.

He had long hair, and he would soak it, he'd get very drunk on rice wine,

then he'd soak his hair in ink, and slosh it all over the paper.

Then he would do a Rorschach test on it,

and decide what kind of a landscape it actually was,

and then put in the finishing touches.

And suddenly, out of this apparent mess, a great landscape would be evoked.

But the whole art of the thing lay in putting in the finishing touches.

And also, there's a very curious thing.

If a person who is untrained in painting, makes a mess with a brush,

it's liable to be just a mess.

Whereas if a person who has the feeling of painting in them for a long time,

and they make a mess with a brush, or just do anything, it looks interesting.

When you get a piece of jade, and look at its markings,

you don't think of them as chaotic.

When you see a dirty old ashtray, with cigarette butts in it,

and rolled up bits of paper, and pieces of Kleenex, and things that everybody's throw away,

you know that that's a mess.

And you don't want that kind of a mess around, you get rid of it.

But, when you look at the patterns on rocks, or the shapes of clouds,

or the outlines of trees, you've got something which isn't orderly in the sense of being symmetrical.

It doesn't form fours.

You know?

But you know it's beautiful.

Blue mountains are spontaneously blue mountains.

White clouds are spontaneously white clouds.

They just do that, you see?

That's their game.

And, but they are definitely something that we recognize as having an order,

and not being chaos.

But we can't quite pin down wherein that order consists.

So there is this always ungraspable, indefinable principle of order in things, which is Li.

And, uh, that explains why Chinese art appreciates, in all that it does,

a certain element of the uncontrolled.

Now, you see, when you use, for example, a brush,

the brush runs a little dry.

And you're at the mercy of the hairs of this brush.

Now, some painters like to let everything go wild.

But what the ideal that they're aiming at is,

and which you have to be a tremendous master to accomplish,

is to let it go wild within limits.

To create a situation which overall is orderly,

but allows for the unexpected random surprises.

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.

Where the genuine haiku has dropped off all by itself,

and has the whole universe inside it.

From the earliest times, the Zen masters had shown a partiality for short,

gnomic poems, at once laconic and direct,

like their answers to questions about Buddhism.

Just as Tung Shan's Three Pounds of Flax was an answer full of Zen,

but not about Zen,

so the most expressive Zen poetry is that which says nothing.

Which, in other words, is not philosophy or commentary about life.

Basho, who was the great 17th century master of haiku,

said, get a three-foot child to write haiku.

Because they are the sort of direct,

guileless things that children would say.

But now there are magazines devoted to haiku poetry,

where in every issue there will be 10,000 haikus,

written by people all over the country.

And they get so stilted and so affected that one wish one had never heard of haiku.

But there's no formula, you see, for fixing it,

so that you can do it again and again and again.

Because the moment you start doing it again and again and again,

it isn't it anymore, the real thing has escaped.

Do you remember some time ago,

there was a fashion for having wrought iron fish,

just the outline of the fish.

Some artist originally, you know, put this fish together and it looked great.

But then you suddenly found them in every gift shop and dime store,

and they looked perfectly terrible.

So this is the mysterious thing.

Well, not only in the arts, but in lifestyles, in everything,

when you start saying, what is the technique for getting this thing?

And people say, well, this is it.

It's gone.

And when you know how something is done, it doesn't surprise you.

This is known in Zen as a very difficult,

this is the most difficult virtue to attain.

Bougie.

It means nothing special.

It means no business, no artificiality.

So, bougie is where something doesn't stand out like a sore thumb.

But it is absolutely different from being modest.

A bougie person may be immodest,

in the sense that if he knows he can do something well,

he just says he can.

He doesn't go with all sorts of blushing violet techniques.

Bougie, you see, is this mysterious quality of nothing special, no special method.

Because if there is, let me repeat, if we do know the method and we know it infallibly,

it ceases to be interesting.

Thus the aimless life is the constant theme of Zen art of every kind, expressing the artist's own

inner state of going nowhere in a timeless moment.

All of us have those moments occasionally, and it is just then that we catch those vivid glimpses of

the world which cast such a glow over the intervening wastes of memory.

The smell of burning leaves on a morning of autumn haze, a flight of sunlit pigeons against a

thundercloud, the sound of an unseen waterfall at dusk, or the single cry of some unidentified

bird in the depths of the forest. In the art of Zen, every landscape, every sketch of bamboo in

the wind or of lonely rocks is an echo of such moments.

The sense of an infinitely expanded present is nowhere stronger than in Chano Yu, the art of tea.

Since Chano Yu has become a conventional accomplishment for young women, it has been

made the subject of a great deal of sentimental nonsense, associated with brocaded young dolls

in moonlit rooms, nervously trying to imitate the most stilted feelings about porcelain and cherry

blossom. But in the austere purity of, say, the Soshu-sen school, the art of tea is a

genuine expression of Zen which requires, if necessary, no further apparatus than a bowl,

tea, and hot water. If there is not even that, Chado, the way of tea, can be practiced everywhere

and with anything, since it is really the same as Zen.

In the whole history of ceramics, the Chinese developed some of the most elegant work imaginable

with translucent porcelain, white clay, the most subtle designs of all, unbelievable. The lacquer,

the boxes in pure gold, and oh, you know, it was delicious stuff. But then it was just like having too much

eclairs, and uh, ice cream, and filet mignon. Now what happened? The people who practiced Zen,

suddenly got an eye for the beauty of the ordinary. There were two reasons for this.

One was that they became fascinated with what happened spontaneously,

what pattern a brush would make when handled roughly, and the hairlines were shown.

They also, because they practiced Sazen, which is sitting quietly, not thinking of anything special,

but having a completely open mind, that puts you into a state

state where you get much better eyes and ears than you ordinarily have. And you start really seeing things.

Somebody suddenly realized, you see, just the sound of the water is marvelous.

And so, in the same way, they found that it was quite as satisfactory

to listen to the kettle boiling as to listen to an elaborate concert. So what did they do?

They started through, particularly a man called Senna Rikyu, to give parties for very small few guests,

in shacks, little huts in the garden, made of uh, very primitive materials, such as mud walls,

and where they would go and sit, and out of the simplest utensils, carefully chosen by a superb

artist, they would simply sit and enjoy the uncomplicated life. And so was born the tea ceremony.

It was a going back to the primitive, after people were sick of too much civilization.

I was present at a tea ceremony, celebrated by a Zen monk, who happens to be an American.

And he is a man who has done a lot of mountaineering.

And he has, therefore, with him at all times, uh, the sort of equipment that you take on camping in

the mountains, because he does a lot of climbing in Japan. And I said to him, won't you, uh,

well, this afternoon would be very nice to have the tea ceremony, and you did it once before here,

and it was so pleasant. Would you serve it again? He said, yes, by all means.

Before, he had served tea ceremony in the style that Zen monks do it, which is rather simple and

direct, and much more comfortable than all these well-educated ladies who are on, tittering about it,

and are on tiptoe, and nervous, and hoping they won't make a mistake, and all that kind of thing.

It's just dreadful. So he suddenly came in with a small primus stove, set that down.

Then he had an old paint pot, which had inside it an aluminum mug. He set that down.

He then, uh, proceeded to take the aluminum mug out, pour water into the paint pot, and set that on

the primus stove, but he ritually pumped up the primus stove. He did everything in the style of tea

ceremony, but this was a dirty old primus stove. And suddenly the thing began to flame like the god

Fudo, and, uh, he mixed the tea in the traditional way with the whisk, had all the perfect lovely manners,

handing us the aluminum cup. And we got into a long, we, it's a custom after the tea ceremony,

after you've drunk, to pass all the utensils round for inspection. And this is exactly what happened.

And we found that the aluminum cup had the year 1945 stamped on it for some reason.

We got into a discussion about styles of aluminum cups made in 1945.

And it was the funniest thing, but it was a, a complete makeover of the tea ceremony into the modern idiom.

The Zen monks liked also to cultivate gardens which took advantage of an existing natural setting,

to arrange rocks and plants along the edges of a stream, creating a more informal atmosphere,

suggesting a mountain canyon adjoining the monastery buildings. They were always sparing and reserved in

their use of color, as were the sung painters before them, since masses of flowers in sharply varying colors

are seldom found in the state of nature. Though not symmetrical, the Japanese garden has a clearly

perceptible form. Unlike so many English and American flower gardens, it does not resemble a

daub in oil colors, and this delight in the form of plants carries over into the art of flower arrangement

inside the house, accentuating the shapes of single sprays and leaves, rather than bunched colors.

The best image might be a garden consisting of no more than an expanse of raked sand as a ground for

several unhewn rocks overgrown with lichen and moss, such as one may see today in the Zen temples of Kyoto.

The media are the simplest imaginable. The effect is as if one had hardly touched it,

as if it had been transported unchanged from the seashore. But in practice, only the most sensitive

and experienced artist can achieve it. This sounds, of course, as though Zen flavor were a studied and

affected primitivism. Sometimes it is. But the genuine Zen flavor comes when one is almost miraculously

natural without intending to be so. The Zen life is not to make oneself, but rather to grow that way.

Taoism is, then, the original Chinese way of liberation, which combined with Indian Mahayana

Buddhism to produce Zen. It is a liberation from convention and of the creative power of day.

Every attempt to describe and formulate it in words and one at a time thought symbols must, of necessity, distort it.

If we are going to introduce Westerners to the fundamentals of Zen,

we need to revise a bit the procedures and rationale of meditation, so that it doesn't become a competitive

one-upmanship marathon as to who can take this, who can endure, because then that puts it under the domain

of time. The important thing to emphasize is presence, being completely here and not feeling guilty if you enjoy it.

And you can do that most easily in any kind of activity that does not require much discursive thought.

So, in other words, if you want to be shucking peas or digging a plot of ground

or putting up a fence or anything, which you can do without a great deal of discursive thought,

it's perfectly good for meditation. In Buddhism there are what they call the four dignities of man

and they are walking, standing, sitting and lying. And so Zazen is simply sitting Zen.

There is also lying Zen, which is sleeping Zen, of when you sleep, sleep. There is standing Zen,

and there is walking Zen. And there is a very good method of meditation, is the walking method.

That's where you have a cloister that you can simply stroll around. But be here.

Now, there is a difficulty that people come into with this. They get the feeling of, well, is it only this?

I mean, is this all? Nothing seems to be happening much. It's just what's going on. I don't feel,

I feel a little frustrated. I feel particularly enlightened. I, it's just nothing special at all.

I mean, I'm wondering, do I have to do this longer in order for something to happen or what? No, the, the,

there's nothing special supposed to happen. Uh, it's just that this here is it. But you see, you have

difficulty in, in, in accepting it because you still feel, uh, how shall I say, um, the lack of nerve,

to see that you are all of it. You are not an observer who is witnessing the present moment

as something happening to you. If you feel it that way, then you naturally ask, well, what next?

The important thing is that this present which you are experiencing is all of you.

It's not you here looking at the floor there. Uh, the floor is just as much you as the

organism looking at it. You are doing the floor just like you're doing your feet.

It's all one world. And you're responsible for it. So have a good time.

We hope you've enjoyed this Audio Renaissance production of The Way of Zen.