The Way of Zen, by Alan Watts

The impulse to believe the absurd when presented with the unknowable is called religion. Whether this is wise or unwise is the domain of doctrine. Once you understand someone's doctrine, you understand their rationale for believing the absurd. At that point, it may no longer seem absurd. You can get to both sides of this conondrum from here.

Re: The Way of Zen, by Alan Watts

Postby admin » Tue Aug 27, 2019 5:01 am

Three: ZA-ZEN AND THE KOAN

There is a saying in Zen that “original realization is marvelous practice” (Japanese, honsho myoshu a). The meaning is that no distinction is to be made between the realization of awakening (satori) and the cultivation of Zen in meditation and action. Whereas it might be supposed that the practice of Zen is a means to the end of awakening, this is not so. For the practice of Zen is not the true practice so long as it has an end in view, and when it has no end in view it is awakening–the aimless, self-sufficient life of the “eternal now.” To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity. To put it in another way: one does not practice Zen to become a Buddha; one practices it because one is a Buddha from the beginning–and this “original realization” is the starting point of the Zen life. Original realization is the “body” (t’i b) and the marvelous practice the “use” (yung c), and the two correspond respectively to prajna, wisdom, and karuna, the compassionate activity of the awakened Bodhisattva in the world of birth-and-death.

In the two preceding chapters we discussed the original realization. In this and the one that follows we turn to the practice or activity which flows from it–firstly, to the life of meditation and, secondly, to the life of everyday work and recreation.

We have seen that–whatever may have been the practice of the Tang masters–the modern Zen communities, both Soto and Rinzai, attach the highest importance to meditation or “sitting Zen” (zazen). It may seem both strange and unreasonable that strong and intelligent men should simply sit still for hours on end. The Western mentality feels that such things are not only unnatural but 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 keeping 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, 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 possible contributions to a world in turmoil.

There is, indeed, nothing unnatural in long periods of quiet sitting. Cats do it; even dogs and other more nervous animals do it. So-called primitive peoples do it–American Indians, and peasants of almost all nations. The art is most difficult for those who have developed the sensitive intellect to such a point that they cannot help making predictions about the future, and so must be kept in a constant whirl of activity to forestall them. But it would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the world simply in thinking about it and doing about it. One must first experience it more directly, and prolong the experience without jumping to conclusions.

The relevance of za-zen to Zen is obvious when it is remembered that Zen is seeing reality directly, in its “suchness.” To see the world as it is concretely, undivided by categories and abstractions, one must certainly look at it with a mind which is not thinking–which is to say, forming symbols–about it. Za-zen is not, therefore, sitting with a blank mind which excludes all the impressions of the inner and outer senses. It is not “concentration” in the usual sense of restricting the attention to a single sense object, such as a point of light or the tip of one’s nose. It is simply a quiet awareness, without comment, of whatever happens to be here and now. This awareness is attended by the most vivid sensation of “nondifference” between oneself and the external world, between the mind and its contents– oneself and the external world, between the mind and its contents– the various sounds, sights, and other impressions of the surrounding environment. Naturally, this sensation does not arise by trying to acquire it; it just comes by itself when one is sitting and watching without any purpose in mind–even the purpose of getting rid of purpose.

In the sodo or zendo, 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 near-by 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 za-zen. 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, 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 center 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 back and forth along the floor between the platforms, each carrying a keisaku 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 keisaku.”1

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 za-zen 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 za-zen is kept up almost continuously from 3:30 a.m. until 10 p.m., and these long periods are called sesshin, 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 za-zen, meals, services, lectures, or sanzen interviews with the master.

The ritualistic or ceremonious style is so characteristic of Zen that it may need some explanation in a culture which has come to associate it with affectation or superstition. In Buddhism the four principal activities of man-walking, standing, sitting, and lying–are called the four “dignities,” since they are the postures assumed by the Buddha nature in its human (nirmanakaya) body. The ritualistic style of conducting one’s everyday activities is therefore a celebration of the fact that “the ordinary man is a Buddha,” and is, furthermore, a style that comes almost naturally to a person who is furthermore, a style that comes almost naturally to a person who is doing everything with total presence of mind. Thus if in something so simple and trivial as lighting a cigarette one is fully aware, seeing the flame, the curling smoke, and the regulation of the breath as the most important things in the universe, it will seem to an observer that the action has a ritualistic style.

This attitude of “acting as a Buddha” is particularly stressed in the Soto School, where both za-zen and the round of daily activities are not at all seen as means to an end but as the actual realization of Buddhahood. As Dogen says in the Shobogenzo:

Without looking forward to tomorrow every moment, you must think only of this day and this hour. Because tomorrow is difficult and unfixed and difficult to know, you must think of following the Buddhist way while you live today.… You must concentrate on Zen practice without wasting time, thinking that there is only this day and this hour. After that it becomes truly easy. You must forget about the good and bad of your nature, the strength or weakness of your power.2


In za-zen there must be no thought either of aiming at satori or of avoiding birth-and-death, no striving for anything in future time.

If life comes, this is life. If death comes, this is death. There is no reason for your being under their control. Don’t put any hope in them. This life and death are the life of the Buddha. If you try to throw them away in denial, you lose the life of the Buddha.3


The “three worlds” of past, present, and future are not, as is commonly supposed, stretched out to inaccessible distances.

The so-called past is the top of the heart; the present is the top of the fist; and the future is the back of the brain.4


All time is here in this body, which is the body of Buddha. The past exists in its memory and the future in its anticipation, and both of these are now, for when the world is inspected directly and clearly these are now, for when the world is inspected directly and clearly past and future times are nowhere to be found.

This is also the teaching of Bankei:

You are primarily Buddhas; you are not going to be Buddhas for the first time. There is not an iota of a thing to be called error in your inborn mind.… If you have the least desire to be better than you actually are, if you hurry up to the slightest degree in search of something, you are already going against the Unborn.5


Such a view of Zen practice is therefore somewhat difficult to reconcile with the discipline which now prevails in the Rinzai School, and which consists in “passing” a graduated series of approximately fifty koan problems. Many of the Rinzai masters are most emphatic about the necessity of arousing a most intense spirit of seeking–a compelling sense of “doubt” whereby it becomes almost impossible to forget the koan one is trying to solve. Naturally, this leads to a good deal of comparison between the degrees of attainment of various individuals, and a very definite and formal recognition is attached to final “graduation” from the process.

Since the formal details of the koan discipline are one of the few actual secrets remaining in the Buddhist world, it is difficult to appraise it fairly if one has not undergone the training. On the other hand, if one has undergone it one is obliged not to talk about it–save in vague generalities. The Rinzai School has always forbidden the publication of formally acceptable answers to the various koan 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.

There is no reason, however, why the process should actually involve all the silliness about “grades of attainment,” about who has “passed” and who has not, or about who is or is not a “genuine” “passed” and who has not, or about who is or is not a “genuine” Buddha by these formal standards. All well-established religious institutions are beset by this kind of nonsense, and they generally boil down to a kind of aestheticism, an excessive passion for the cultivation of a special “style” whose refinements distinguish the sheep from the goats. By such standards the liturgical aesthete can distinguish Roman from Anglican Catholic priests, confusing the mannerisms of traditional atmosphere with the supernatural marks of true or false participation in the apostolic succession. Sometimes, however, the cultivation of a traditional style may be rather admirable, as when a school of craftsmen or artists hands down from generation to generation certain trade secrets or technical refinements whereby objects of peculiar beauty are manufactured. Even so, this very easily becomes a rather affected and self-conscious discipline, and at that moment all its “Zen” is lost.

The koan system as it exists today is largely the work of Hakuin (1685–1768), a formidable and immensely versatile master, who gave it a systematic organization so that the complete course of Zen study in the Rinzai School is divided into six stages. There are, first, five groups of koan d:

1. Hosshin, or Dharmakaya koan, whereby one “enters into the frontier gate of Zen.”

2. Kikan, or “cunning barrier” koan, having to do with the active expression of the state realized in the first group.

3. Gonsen, or “investigation of words” koan, presumably having to do with the expression of Zen understanding in speech.

4. Nanto, or “hard to penetrate” koan.

5. Goi, or “Five Ranks” koan, based on the five relationships of “lord” and “servant” or of “principle” (li) and “thing-event” (shih), wherein Zen is related to the Hua-yen or Avatamsaka philosophy.

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.6

Normally, this course of training takes about thirty 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), 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 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 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.

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. Such fantasies were based not upon a first-hand study of Buddhism but on literal readings of mythological passages in the sutras, where the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are embellished with innumerable miraculous and superhuman attributes. Thus there must be no confusion between Zen masters and theosophical “mahatmas”–the glamorous “Masters of Wisdom” who live in the mountain fastnesses of Tibet and practice the arts of occultism. Zen masters are quite human. They get sick and die; they know joy and sorrow; they have bad tempers or other little “weaknesses” of character 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.7 A doka poem by Ikkyu says:

We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up;
This is our world.
All we have to do after that–
Is to die.8


Koan training involves typically Asian concepts of the relation between master and pupil which are quite unlike ours. For in Asian cultures this is a peculiarly sacred relationship in which the master is held to become responsible for the karma of the pupil. The pupil, in turn, is expected to accord absolute obedience and authority to the master, and to hold him in almost higher respect than his own father–and in Asian countries this is saying a great deal. To a young Zen monk the roshi therefore stands as a symbol of the utmost patriarchal authority, and he usually plays the role to perfection–being normally a man advanced in years, fierce and “tigerish” in aspect, and, when formally robed and seated for the sanzen interview, a person of supreme presence and dignity. In this role he constitutes a living symbol of everything that makes one afraid of being spontaneous, everything that prompts the most painful and awkward self-consciousness. He assumes this role as an upaya, a skillful device, for challenging the student to find enough “nerve” to be perfectly natural in the presence of this formidable archetype. If he can do this, he is a free man whom no one on earth can embarrass. It must be borne in mind, too, that in Japanese culture the adolescent and the youth are peculiarly susceptible to ridicule, which is freely used as a means of conforming the young to social convention.

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 hindering. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to put obstacles and barriers in the student’s path. Thus Wu-men’s comments on the various koan in the Wu-men kuan are intentionally misleading, the koan as a whole are called “wisteria vines” or “entanglements,” and particular groups “cunning barriers” (kikan) and “hard to penetrate” (nanto). This is like encouraging the growth of a hedge by pruning, for obviously the basic intention is to help, but the Zen student does not really know Zen unless he finds it out for himself. The Chinese proverb “What comes in through the gate is not family treasure” is understood in Zen to mean that what someone else tells you is not your own knowledge. Satori, as Wu-men explained, comes only after one has exhausted one’s thinking, only when one is convinced that the mind cannot grasp itself. In the words of another of Ikkyu’s doka:

A mind to search elsewhere
For the Buddha,
Is foolishness
In the very centre of foolishness.


For

My self of long ago,
In nature non-existent;
Nowhere to go when dead,
Nothing at all.9


The preliminary hosshin 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 za-zen or whether working or eating. He night, whether actually in za-zen or whether working or eating. He is encouraged, in fact, to make a total fool of himself, to whirl round and round like a dog trying to catch up with its own tail.

Thus normal first koan are Hui-neng’s “Original Face,” Chaochou’s “Wu,” or Hakuin’s “One Hand.” At the first sanzen 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. He is told to return when he has discovered it, and to give some proof of discovery. In the meantime he is under no circumstance to discuss the problem with others or to seek their help. Joining the other monks in the sodo, the jikijitsu or “head monk” will probably instruct him in the rudiments of za-zen, showing him how to sit, and perhaps encouraging him to return to the roshi for sanzen as soon as possible, and to lose no opportunity for getting the proper view of his koan. Pondering the problem of his “original face,” he therefore tries and tries to imagine what he was before he was born, or, for that matter, what he now is at the very center of his being, what is the basic reality of his existence apart from his extension in time and space.

He soon discovers that the roshi has no patience whatever with philosophical or other wordy answers. For the roshi wants to be “shown.” He wants something concrete, some solid proof. The student therefore begins to produce such “specimens of reality” as lumps of rock, leaves and branches, shouts, gestures of the hands– anything and everything he can imagine. But all is resolutely rejected until the student, unable to imagine anything more, is brought to his wits’ end–at which point he is of course beginning to get on the right track. He “knows that he doesn’t know.”

When the beginning koan is Chao-chou’s “Wu,” the student is asked to find out why Chao-chou 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,” e and therefore Hakuin asked, “What is the sound of one hand?” 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; the whole world, including himself, is an enormous mass of pure doubt. Everything he hears, touches, or sees is as incomprehensible as “nothing” or “the sound of one hand.” At sanzen he is perfectly dumb. He walks or sits all day in a “vivid daze,” conscious of everything going on around him, responding mechanically to circumstances, but totally baffled by everything.

After some time in this state there comes a moment when the block of ice suddenly collapses, 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. Yet at the same time this transparent meaninglessness can laugh and talk, eat and drink, run up and down, look at the earth and sky, and all this without any sense of there being a problem, a sort of psychological knot, in the midst of it. There is no knot because the “mind seeking to know the mind” or the “self seeking to control the self” has been defeated out of existence and exposed for the abstraction which it always was. And when that tense knot vanishes there is no more sensation of a hard core of selfhood standing over against the rest of the world. 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 ask 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 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.” One can perhaps understand why a man who had practiced za-zen for eight years told R. H. Blyth that “Zen is just a trick of words,” for on the principle of extracting a thorn with a thorn Zen is extricating people from the tangle in which they find themselves from confusing words and ideas with reality.

The continued practice of za-zen 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 he concludes each koan, the roshi usually requires that he present a verse from the Zenrin Kushu which expresses the point of the koan just solved. Other books are also used, and the late Sokei-an Sasaki, working in the United States, found that an admirable manual for this purpose was Alice in Wonderland!. 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 nerves. By such means he learns to respond with it instantly and unwaveringly in the situations of everyday life.

The final group of koan are concerned with the “Five Ranks” (goi)– a schematic view of the relations between relative knowledge and absolute knowledge, thing-events (shih) and underlying principle (li). The originator of the scheme was T’ung-shan (807– 869), but it arises from the contacts of Zen with the Hua-yen (Japanese, Kegon) School, and the doctrine of the Five Ranks is (Japanese, Kegon) School, and the doctrine of the Five Ranks is closely related to that of the fourfold Dharmadhatu.10 The Ranks are often represented in terms of the relative positions of lord and servant or host and guest, standing respectively for the underlying principle and the thing-events. Thus we have:

1. The lord looks down at the servant.

2. The servant looks up at the lord.

3. The lord.

4. The servant.

5. The lord and the servant converse together.

Suffice it to say that the first four correspond to the four Dharmadhatu of the Hua-yen School, though the relationship is somewhat complex, and the fifth to “naturalness,” In other words, one may regard the universe, the Dharmadhatu, from a number of equally valid points of view–as many, as one, as both one and many, and as neither one nor many. But the final position of Zen is that it does not take any special viewpoint, and yet is free to take every viewpoint according to the circumstances. In the words of Lin-chi:

Sometimes I take away the man (i.e., the subject) but do not take away the circumstances (i.e., the object). Sometimes I take away the circumstances but do not take away the man. Sometimes I take away both the man and the circumstances. Sometimes I take away neither the man nor the circumstances.11 f


And sometimes, he might have added, I just do nothing special (wushih). 12

Koan training comes to its conclusion in the stage of perfect naturalness of freedom in both the absolute and the relative worlds, but because this freedom is not opposed to the conventional order, but is rather a freedom which “upholds the world” (lokasamgraha), the final phase of study is the relationship of Zen to the rules of social and monastic life. As Yun-men once asked, “In such a wide world, why answer the bell and put on ceremonial robes?”13 Another master’s answer in quite a different context applies well here–“If there is any reason for it you may cut off my head!” For the here–“If there is any reason for it you may cut off my head!” For the moral act is significantly moral only when it is free, without the compulsion of a reason or necessity. This is also the deepest meaning of the Christian doctrine of free will, for to act “in union with God” is to act, not from the constraint of fear or pride, nor from hope of reward, but with the baseless love of the “unmoved mover.”

To say that the koan system has certain dangers or drawbacks is only to say that anything can be misused. It is a highly sophisticated and even institutionalized technique, and therefore lends itself to affectation and artificiality. But so does any technique, even when so untechnical as Bankei’s method of no method. This, too, can become a fetish. Yet it is important to be mindful of the points at which the drawbacks are most likely to arise, and it would seem that in koan training there are two.

The first is to insist that the koan is the “only way” to a genuine realization of Zen. Of course, one may beg the question by saying that Zen, over and above the experience of awakening, is precisely the style of handling Buddhism which the koan embody. But in this case the Soto School is not Zen, and no Zen is to be found anywhere in the world outside the particular tradition of the Rinzai branch. So defined, Zen has no universality and becomes as exotic and culturally conditioned as No drama or the practice of Chinese calligraphy. From the standpoint of the West, such Zen will appeal only to fanciers of “Nipponery,” to romanticists who like to play at being Japanese. Not that there is anything inherently “bad” in such romanticism, for there are no such things as “pure” cultures, and the borrowing of other people’s styles always adds to the variety and spice of life. But Zen is so much more than a cultural refinement.

The second, and more serious, 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 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, and it was of such a satori that Yün-feng said, “That monk who has any satori goes right into hell like a flying arrow.”14

Awakening almost necessarily involves a sense of relief because it brings to an end the habitual psychological cramp of trying to grasp the mind with the mind, which in turn generates the ego with all its conflicts and defenses. In time, the sense of relief wears off–but not the awakening, unless one has confused it with the sense of relief and has attempted to exploit it by indulging in ecstasy. Awakening is thus only incidentally pleasant or ecstatic, only at first an experience of intense emotional release. But in itself it is just the ending of an artificial and absurd use of the mind. Above and beyond that it is wu-shih–nothing special–since the ultimate content of awakening is never a particular object of knowledge or experience. The Buddhist doctrine of the “Four Invisibles” is that the Void (sunya) is to a Buddha as water to a fish, air to a man, and the nature of things to the deluded–beyond conception.

It should be obvious that what we are, most substantially and fundamentally, will never be a distinct object of knowledge. Whatever we can know–life and death, light and darkness, solid and empty–will be the relative aspects of something as inconceivable as the color of space. Awakening is not to know what this reality is. As a Zenrin poem says:

As butterflies come to the newly planted flowers,
Bodhidharma says, “I know not.” g


Awakening is to know what reality is not. It is to cease identifying oneself with any object of knowledge whatsoever. Just as every assertion about the basic substance or energy of reality must be meaningless, any assertion as to what “I am” at the very roots of my meaningless, any assertion as to what “I am” at the very roots of my being must also be the height of folly. Delusion is the false metaphysical premise at the root of common sense; it is the average man’s unconscious ontology and epistemology, his tacit assumption that he is a “something.” The assumption that “I am nothing” would, of course, be equally wrong since something and nothing, being and non-being, are related concepts, and belong equally to the “known.”

One method of muscular relaxation is to begin by increasing tension in the muscles so as to have a clear feeling of what not to do.15 In this sense there is some point in using the initial koan as a means of intensifying the mind’s absurd effort to grasp itself. But to identify satori with the consequent feeling of relief, with the sense of relaxation, is quite misleading, for the satori is the letting go and not the feeling of it. The conscious aspect of the Zen life is not, therefore, satori–not the “original mind”-but everything one is left free to do and to see and feel when the cramp in the mind has been released.

From this standpoint Bankei’s simple trust in the “Unborn mind” and even Shinran’s view of Nembutsu are also entrances to satori. To “let go” it is not always necessary to wear out the attempt to grasp until it becomes intolerable. As against this violent way there is also a judo–a. “gentle way,” the way of seeing that the mind, the basic reality, remains spontaneous and ungrasped whether one tries to grasp it or not. One’s own doing or not doing drop away by sheer irrelevance. To think that one must grasp or not grasp, let go or not let go, is only to foster the illusion that the ego is real, and that its machinations are an effective obstacle to the Tao. Beside the spontaneous functioning of the “Unborn mind” these efforts or none efforts are strictly null. In the more imagistic language of Shinran, one has only to hear of the “saving vow” of Amitabha and to say his Name, the Nembutsu, even just once without concern as to whether one has faith or not, or as to whether one is desireless or not. All such concern is the pride of the ego. In the words of the Shin-shu mystic Kichi-bei:

When all the idea of self-power based upon moral values and When all the idea of self-power based upon moral values and disciplinary measures is purged, there is nothing left in you that will declare itself to be the hearer, and just because of this you do not miss anything you hear.16


So long as one thinks about listening, one cannot hear clearly, and so long as one thinks about trying or not trying to let go of oneself, one cannot let go. Yet whether one thinks about listening or not, the ears are hearing just the same, and nothing can stop the sound from reaching them.

The advantage of the koan method is perhaps that, for general purposes, the other way is too subtle, and too easily subject to misinterpretation–especially by monks who might all too readily use it as an excuse for loafing around the monastery while living off the donations of the devout laity. This is almost certainly why the emphasis of the T’ang masters on “not-seeking” gave way to the more energetic use of the koan as a means of exhausting the strength of the egoistic will. Bankei’s Zen without method or means offers no basis for a school or institution, since the monks may just as well go their way and take up farming or fishing. As a result no external sign of Zen is left; there is no longer any finger pointing at the moon of Truth–and this is necessary for the Bodhisattva’s task of delivering all beings, even though it runs the risk of mistaking the finger for the moon.

_______________

Notes:

1 In Suzuki (5), p. 99. The regulations also say, “When submitting to the keisaku, courteously fold your hands and bow; do not permit any egoistic thoughts to assert themselves and cherish anger.” The point seems to be that the keisaku has two uses–one for shoulder massage and another, however politely worded, for punishment. It is of interest that Bankei abolished this practice in his own community, on the ground that a man is no less a Buddha when asleep than when awake.

2 Zuimonki chapter. In Masunaga (1), p. 42.

3 Shop chapter. Ibid., p. 44.

4 Kenbutsu chapter. Ibid., p. 45.

5 In Suzuki (10), pp. 177–78.

6 This outline is based on information given in a conference at the American Academy of Asian Studies by Ruth Sasaki.

7 One can hardly exaggerate the importance of the great Buddhist symbol of the bhavachakra, the Wheel Becoming. The angels and demons occupy the highest and lowest positions, the positions of perfect happiness and perfect frustration. These positions lie on the opposite sides of a circle because they lead to each other. They represent not so much literal beings as our own ideals and terrors, since the Wheel is actually a map of the human mind. The human position lies in the middle, i.e., at the left of the Wheel, and it is only from this position that one may become a Buddha. Human birth is therefore regarded as unusually fortunate, but this is not to be confused with the physical event, for one is not actually “born into the human world” until one has fully accepted one’s humanity.

8 Translated by R. H. Blyth in “Ikkyu’s Doka,” The Young East, vol. 2, no. 7. (Tokyo, 1953.)

9 R. H. BIyth, ibid., vol. 3, no. 9, p. 14, and vol. 2, no. 2, p. 7.

10 For details, see above, pp. 160f.

11 In Ku-tsun-hsü Yü-lu, 1. 4, pp. 3–4.

12 A detailed but extremely confusing account of the Five Ranks will be found in Dumoulin and Sasaki (1), pp. 25–29.

13 Wu-men kuan, 16.

14 Ku-tsun-hsü Yü-lu, 41.

15 See Edmund Jacobson, Progressive Relaxation. (Chicago, 1938.)

16 In Suzuki (10), p. 130.
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Re: The Way of Zen, by Alan Watts

Postby admin » Tue Aug 27, 2019 5:04 am

Four: 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 should 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.

This does not mean that the art forms of Zen are left to mere chance, as if one were to dip a snake in ink and let it wiggle around on a sheet of paper. The point is rather that for Zen there is no duality, no conflict between the natural element of chance and the human element of control. The constructive powers of the human mind are no more artificial than the formative actions of plants or bees, so that from the standpoint of Zen it is no contradiction to say that artistic technique is discipline in spontaneity and spontaneity in discipline.

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 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 our explorers and scientists also 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.

Taoism, Confucianism, and Zen are expressions of a mentality which feels completely at home in this universe, and which sees man as an integral part of his environment. Human intelligence is not an imprisoned spirit from afar but an aspect of the whole intricately balanced organism of the natural world, whose principles were first explored in the Book of Changes. Heaven and earth are alike members of this organism, and nature is as much our father as our mother, since the Tao by which it works is originally manifested in the yang and the yin–the male and female, positive and negative principles which, in dynamic balance, maintain the order of the world. The insight which lies at the root of Far Eastern culture is that opposites are relational and so fundamentally harmonious. Conflict is always comparatively superficial, for there can be no ultimate conflict when the pairs of opposites are mutually interdependent. Thus our stark divisions of spirit and nature, subject and object, good and evil, artist and medium are quite foreign to this culture.

In a universe whose fundamental principle is relativity rather than warfare there is no purpose because there is no victory to be won, no end to be attained. For every end, as the word itself shows, is an extreme, an opposite, and exists only in relation to its other end. Because the world is not going anywhere there is no hurry. One may as well “take it easy” like nature itself, and in the Chinese language the “changes” of nature and “ease” are the same word, i.a This is a first principle in the study of Zen and of any Far Eastern art: hurry, and all that it involves, is fatal. For there is no goal to be attained. The moment a goal is conceived it becomes impossible to practice the discipline of the art, to master the very rigor of its technique. Under the watchful and critical eye of a master one may technique. Under the watchful and critical eye of a master one may practice the writing of Chinese characters for days and days, months and months. But he watches as a gardener watches the growth of a tree, and wants his student to have the attitude of the tree–the attitude of purposeless growth in which there are no short cuts because every stage of the way is both beginning and end. Thus the most accomplished master no more congratulates himself upon “arriving” than the most fumbling beginner.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world. Absence of hurry also involves a certain lack of interference with the natural course of events, especially when it is felt that the natural course follows principles which are not foreign to human intelligence. For, as we have seen, the Taoist mentality makes, or forces, nothing but “grows” everything. When human reason is seen to be an expression of the same spontaneous balance of yang and yin as the natural universe, man’s action upon his environment is not felt as a conflict, an action from outside. Thus the difference between forcing and growing cannot be expressed in terms of specific directions as to what should or should not be done, for the difference lies primarily in the quality and feeling of the action. The difficulty of describing these things for Western ears is that people in a hurry cannot feel.

The expression of this whole attitude in the arts is perhaps best approached through painting and poetry. Although it may seem that: the arts of Zen are confined to the more refined expressions of culture, it should be remembered that almost every profession and craft is known in Japan as a do, that is, a Tao or Way, not unlike what used to be known in the West as a “mystery.” To some extent, every do was at one time a lay method of learning the principles which are embodied in Taoism, Zen, and Confucianism, even as modern Masonry is a survival from times when the craft of the mason was a means of initiation into a spiritual tradition. Even in modern Osaka some of the older merchants follow a do or way of commerce based upon shingaku–a system of psychology closely related to Zen.

After the persecution of Chinese Buddhism in 845, Zen was for some time not only the dominant form of Buddhism but also the most powerful spiritual influence in the growth of Chinese culture. This influence was at its height during the Southern Sung dynasty (1127–1279), and during this time the Zen monasteries became leading centers of Chinese scholarship. Lay scholars, Confucian and Taoist alike, visited them for periods of study, and Zen monks in turn familiarized themselves with Chinese classical studies. 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 Chinese gentleman-scholar was not a specialist, and it was quite against the nature of the Zen monk to confine his interests and activities to purely “religious” affairs. 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. It was during this same period that Eisai and Dogen came from Japan to return with Zen to their own country, to be followed by an incessant stream of Japanese scholar-monks eager to take home not only Zen but every other aspect of Chinese culture. 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.

Sumi-e, as the Japanese call this style of painting, may have been perfected as early as the Tang dynasty by the almost legendary masters Wu Tao-tzu (c. 700–760) and Wang-wei (c. 698–759). However, the authenticity of works ascribed to them is doubtful, though they may be as early as the ninth century and include a painting so fully characteristic of Zen as the impressionistic waterfall attributed to Wang-wei–a thundering stream of sheer power, suggested by a few slightly curved sweeps of the brush between two masses of rock. The great formative age of this style was undoubtedly the Sung dynasty (959–1279), and is represented by such painters as Hsia-kuei, Ma-yüan, Mu-ch’i, and Liang-k’ai.

The Sung masters were pre-eminently landscape painters, creators of a tradition of “nature painting” which has hardly been surpassed anywhere in the world. For it shows us the life of nature– of mountains, waters, mists, rocks, trees, and birds–as felt by Taoism and Zen. It is a world to which man belongs but which he does not dominate; it is sufficient to itself, for it was not “made for” anyone and has no purpose of its own. As Hsüan-chüeh said:

Over the river, the shining moon; in the pine trees, sighing wind;
All night long so tranquil–why? And for whom?1 b


Sung landscapes are by no means as fantastic and stylized as Western critics often suggest, for to travel in similar territory, in mountainous, misty country, is to see them at every turn of the road, and it is a simple matter for the photographer to take pictures which look exactly like Chinese paintings. One of the most striking features of the Sung landscape, as of sumi-e as a whole, is the features of the Sung landscape, as of sumi-e as a whole, 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-yüan, in particular, was a master of this technique, which amounts almost to “painting by not painting,” or what Zen sometimes calls “playing the string-less lute.” The secret lies in knowing how to balance form with emptiness and, above all, in knowing when one has “said” enough. For Zen spoils neither the aesthetic shock nor the satori shock by filling in, by explanation, second thoughts, and intellectual commentary. Furthermore, the figure so integrally related to its empty space gives the feeling of the “marvelous Void” from which the event suddenly appears.

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. Zen artists have preserved this technique to the present day in the so-called zenga style of Chinese characters, circles, bamboo branches, birds, or human figures drawn with these uninhibited, powerful brush strokes which keep on moving even when the painting is finished. After Mu-ch’i, perhaps the greatest master of the rough brush was the Japanese monk Sesshu (1421–1506), whose formidable technique included the most refined screens of pine trees and birds, mountain landscapes reminiscent of Hsia-kuei, and almost violently alive landscapes for which he used not only the brush but fistfuls of inked straw to get the right texture of “flying hair lines.”

The Western eye is immediately struck by the absence of symmetry in these paintings, by the consistent avoidance of regular and geometrical shapes, whether straight or curved. For the characteristic brush line is jagged, gnarled, irregularly twisting, dashing, or sweeping–always spontaneous rather than predictable. Even when the Zen monk or artist draws a solitary circle-one of the most common themes of zenga–it is not only slightly eccentric and out of shape, but the very texture of the line is full of life and verve with the incidental splashes and gaps of the “rough brush.” For the abstract or “perfect” circle becomes concrete and natural–a living circle–and, in the same way, rocks and trees, clouds and waters appear to the Chinese eye as most like themselves when most unlike the intelligible forms of the geometer and architect.

Western science has made nature intelligible in terms of its symmetries and regularities, analyzing its most wayward forms into components of a regular and measurable shape. As a result we tend to see nature and to deal with it as an “order” from which the element of spontaneity has been “screened out.” But this order is maya, and the “true suchness” of things has nothing in common with the purely conceptual aridities of perfect squares, circles, or triangles–except by spontaneous accident. Yet this is why the Western mind is dismayed when ordered conceptions of the universe break down, and when the basic behavior of the physical world is found to be a “principle of uncertainty.” We find such a world meaningless and inhuman, but familiarity with Chinese and Japanese art forms might lead us to an altogether new appreciation of this world in its living, and finally unavoidable, reality.

Mu-ch’i and Liang-k’ai did many paintings of the Zen Patriarchs and masters, whom they represented for the most part as abandoned lunatics, scowling, shouting, loafing around, or roaring with laughter at drifting leaves. As favorite themes they adopted, as Zen figures, the two crazy hermits Han-shan and Shih-te, and the enormously rotund folk-god Pu-tai, to complete a marvelous assortment of happy tramps and rogues to exemplify the splendid nonsense and emptiness of the Zen life. Zen and–to some extent– Taoism seem to be the only spiritual traditions which feel secure enough to lampoon themselves, or to feel sufficiently un-self-conscious to laugh not only about their religion but in the midst of it. In these lunatic figures the Zen artists portray something slightly more than a parody of their own wu-shin or “mindless” way of life, for as “genius is to madness close allied” there is a suggestive parallel between the meaningless babble of the happy lunatic and the purposeless life of the Zen sage. In the words of a Zenrin poem:

The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection;
The water has no mind to receive their image.


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 men have these moments occasionally, and it is just then that they 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 a 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.

Where the mood of the moment is solitary and quiet it is called sabi.c When the artist is feeling depressed or sad, and in this peculiar emptiness of feeling catches a glimpse of something rather ordinary and unpretentious in its incredible “suchness,” the mood is called wabi.d When the moment evokes a more intense, nostalgic sadness, connected with autumn and the vanishing away of the world, it is called aware.e And when the vision is the sudden perception of something mysterious and strange, hinting at an unknown never to be discovered, the mood is called yugen.f These extremely untranslatable Japanese words denote the four basic moods of furyu,g that is, of the general atmosphere of Zen “taste” in its perception of the aimless moments of life.

Inspired by the Sung masters, the Japanese produced a whole cluster of superb sumi painters whose work ranks today among the most prized treasures of the nation’s art–Muso Kokushi (1275– 1351), Cho Densu (d. 1431), Shubun (1414–1465), Soga Jasoku (d. 1483), Sesshu (1421–1506), Miyamoto Musashi (1582–1645), and many others. Notable paintings were also made by the great Zen monks Hakuin and Sengai (1750–1837), the latter showing a flair for abstract painting so startlingly suggestive of the twentieth century that it is easy to understand the interest of so many contemporary painters in Zen.

Toward the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japanese artists Toward the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japanese artists developed a still more suggestive and “offhand” style of sumi-e called haiga as an illustrative accompaniment to haiku poems. These were derived from zenga, the informal paintings of the Zen monks accompanying verses from the Zenrin Kushu and sayings from the various mondo and the sutras. Zenga and haiga represent the most “extreme” form of sumi painting–the most spontaneous, artless, and rough, replete with all those “controlled accidents” of the brush in which they exemplify the marvelous meaninglessness of nature itself.

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. Many of these, like those we have quoted from the Zenrin Kushu, contained overt references to Zen and its principles. However, 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. A monk asked Feng-hsüeh, “When speech and silence are both inadmissible, how can one pass without error?” The master replied:

I always remember Kiangsu in March–
The cry of the partridge, the mass of fragrant flowers!2
h


Here again, as in painting, is the expression of a live moment in its pure “suchness” -- though it is a pity to have to say so -- and the masters frequently quoted classical Chinese poetry in this way, using couplets or quatrains which pointed, and said no more.

The practice of taking couplets from the old Chinese poems for use as songs was also favored in literary circles, and at the beginning of the eleventh century Fujiwara Kinto compiled an anthology of such excerpts, together with short Japanese waka poems, under the title Roeishu, the Collection of Clear Songs. Such a use of poetry obviously expresses the same type of artistic vision as we find in the paintings of Ma-yüan and Mu-ch’i, the same use of empty space brought to life with a few strokes of the brush. In empty space brought to life with a few strokes of the brush. 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 (1643–1694), whose feeling for Zen wanted to express itself in a type of poetry altogether in the spirit of wu-shih -- “nothing special.” “To write haiku,” he said, “get a three-foot child”–for Basho’s poems have the same inspired objectivity as a child’s expression of wonder, and return us to that same feeling of the world as when it first met our astonished eyes.

Kimi hi take
Yoki mono misera
Yukimaroge!

You light the fire;
I’ll show you something nice,–
A great ball of snow!3


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. Bankei, his contemporary, did just the same thing for Zen, for as one of Ikkyu’s doka poems says:

Whatever runs counter
To the mind and will of ordinary people
Hinders the Law of Men
And the Law of Buddha.4


This is in the spirit of Nan-ch’üan’s saying, “The ordinary mind is the Tao”–where “ordinary” means “simply human” rather than “merely vulgar.” It was thus that the seventeenth century saw an extraordinary popularization of the Zen atmosphere in Japan, reaching down from the monks and samurai to farmers and artisans.

The true feeling of haiku is “given away” in one of Basho’s poems which, however, says just too much to be true haiku:

How admirable,
He who thinks not, “Life is fleeting,”
When he sees the lightning!


For the haiku sees things in their “suchness,” without comment–a view of the world which the Japanese call sono-mama, “Just as it is,” or “Just so.”

Weeds in the rice-field,
Cut and left lying just so–
Fertilizer!


In Zen a man has no mind apart from what he knows and sees, and this is almost expressed by Gochiku in the haiku:

The long night;
The sound of the water
Says what I think.


And still more directly–

The stars on the pond;
Again the winter shower
Ruffles the water.


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 obvious in

On a withered branch
A crow is perched,
In the autumn evening.


But it is less obvious and therefore deeper in

With the evening breeze,
The water laps against
The heron’s legs.

In the dark forest
A berry drops:
The sound of the water.


Sabi is, however, 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

A brushwood gate,
And for a lock–
This snail.

The woodpecker
Keeps on in the same place:
Day is closing.

Winter desolation;
In the rain-water tub,
Sparrows are walking.


Aware is not quite grief, and not quite nostalgia in the usual sense of longing for the return of a beloved past. Aware is the echo of what has passed and of what was loved, giving them a resonance such as a great cathedral gives to a choir, so that they would be the poorer without it.

No one lives at the Barrier of Fuha;
The wooden penthouse is fallen away;
All that remains

Is the autumn wind.
The evening haze;
Thinking of past things,
How far-off they are!


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.


That moment of transition is just about to “cross over” in the haiku written by Issa upon the death of his child:

This dewdrop world–
It may be a dewdrop,
And yet–and yet–


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.


Or an example of yugen in the Zenrin poems:

Wind subsiding, the flowers still fall;
Bird crying, the mountain silence deepens.4


Because Zen training had involved a constant use of these Chinese couplets since at least the end of the fifteenth century, the emergence of haiku is hardly surprising. The influence is self-evident in this “yugen-in-reverse” haiku by Moritake. The Zenrin says:

The shattered mirror will reflect no more;
The fallen flower will hardly rise to the branch.j


And Moritake–

A fallen flower
Returning to the branch?
It was a butterfly.


The association of Zen with poetry must inevitably bring up the name of the Soto Zen monk and hermit Ryokan (1758–1831). So often one thinks of the saint as a man whose sincerity provokes the enmity of the world, but Ryokan holds the distinction of being the saint whom everyone loved–perhaps because he was natural, again as a child, rather than good. 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.5 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 his view of “nature” is all of a piece:

The sound of the scouring
Of the saucepan blends
With the tree-frogs’ voices.


In some ways Ryokan is a Japanese St. Francis, though much less obviously religious. He is a wandering fool, un-self-consciously playing games with children, living in a lonely hut in the forest where the roof leaks and the wall is hung with poems in his marvelously illegible, spidery handwriting, so prized by Japanese calligraphers. 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 there is no money,

The wind brings
Fallen leaves enough
To make a fire.


When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present–normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen. 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 chajin, 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 (ikebana).

Since cha-no-yu has become a conventional accomplishment for young ladies, 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 anywhere and with anything, since it is really the same as Zen.

If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea. Its quietening, clarifying, and slightly bitter taste gives it almost the same taste as awakening itself, though the bitterness corresponds to the pleasing roughness of “natural texture,” and the “middle path” between sweet and sour. Long before the development of cha-no-yu, tea was used by Zen monks as a stimulant for meditation, and in this context it was drunk in a mood of unhurried awareness which naturally lent itself to a ritualistic type of action. In summer it refreshed and in winter warmed those wandering hermit-monks who liked to build grass and bamboo huts in the mountain forests, or by rock-filled streams in the gorges. The totally undistracting emptiness and simplicity of the Taoist or Zen hermitage has set the style not only for the special type of house for cha-no-yu but for Japanese domestic architecture as a whole.6

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Bodhidharma. By Hakuin Zenji (1683-1768) Yamamoto Collection. Photo courtesy of Oak land Art Museum.

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Two views of the rock and sand garden at Ryoanji, Kyoto.

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Bodhidharma and Hui-k’e. By Sesshu (1420-1506).

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Haboku Landscape. By Sesshu (1420-1506). Tokyo Museum.

The monastic “tea ceremony” was introduced into Japan by Eisai, and though its form is different from the present cha-no-yu, it was nonetheless its origin, and appears to have been adopted for lay use during the fifteenth century. From this the cha-no-yu proper was perfected by Sen-no-Rikyu (1518–1591), and from him descend the three main schools of tea now flourishing. Ceremonial tea is not the ordinary leaf tea which is steeped in hot water; it is finely 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.7

Ideally, the house for cha-no-yu is a small hut set apart from the main dwelling in its own garden. The hut is floored with tatami, or straw mats, enclosing a fire-pit; the roof is usually thatched with rice straw; and the walls, as in all Japanese homes, are paper shoji supported by uprights of wood with a natural finish. One side of the room is occupied by an alcove, or toko-noma, the position for a single hanging scroll of painting or calligraphy, together with a rock, a spray of flowers, or some other object of art.

The atmosphere, though formal, is strangely relaxed, and the guests feel free to talk or watch in silence as they wish. The host takes his time to prepare a charcoal fire, and with a bamboo dipper pours water into a squat kettle of soft brown iron. In the same formal but completely unhurried manner, he brings in the other utensils–a plate with a few cakes, the tea bowl and caddy, the whisk, and a larger bowl for leavings. During these preparations a casual conversation continues, and soon the water in the kettle begins to simmer and sigh, so that the guests fall silent to listen. After a while, the host serves tea to the guests one by one from the same bowl, taking it from the caddy with a strip of bamboo bent into a spoon, pouring water from the kettle with the long-handled dipper, whipping it into a froth with the whisk, and laying the bowl before the first guest with its most interesting side towards him.

The bowls used for cha-no-yu are normally dull-colored and roughly finished, often unglazed at the base, and on the sides the glaze has usually been allowed to run–an original fortunate mistake which has been seen to offer endless opportunities for the “controlled accident.” Specially favored are Korean rice bowls of the cheapest quality, a peasant ware of crude texture from which the tea masters have selected unintentional masterpieces of form. the tea 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.

Every appurtenance of the cha-no-yu has been selected in accordance with canons of taste over which the most sensitive men in Japan have brooded for centuries. Though the choice is usually intuitive, careful measurement of the objects reveals interesting and unexpected proportions–works of spontaneous geometry as remarkable as the spiral shell of the nautilus or the structure of the snow crystal. Architects, painters, gardeners, and craftsmen of all kinds have worked in consultation with the cha-no-yu masters, like an orchestra with its conductor, so that their “Zen taste” has passed on into the objects made by the same craftsmen for everyday use. This applies most particularly to ordinary, functional things–kitchen implements, shoji paper, soup bowls, common teapots and cups, floor mats, baskets, utilitarian bottles and jars, textiles for everyday clothing, and a hundred other simple artifacts in which the Japanese show their good taste to best advantage.

The “Zen” of the cha-no-yu comes out all the more for the purely secular character of the ritual, which has no liturgical character like the Catholic Mass or the elaborate ceremonies of Shingon Buddhism. Though the guests avoid political, financial, or business matters in their conversation, there is sometimes non-argumentative discussion of philosophical matters, though the preferred topics are artistic and natural. It must be remembered that Japanese people take to such subjects as readily and un-self-consciously as we talk of sports or travel, and that their discussion of natural beauty is not the affectation it might be in our own culture. Furthermore, they do not affectation it might be in our own culture. Furthermore, they do not feel in the least guilty about this admitted “escape” from the so-called “realities” of business and worldly competition. Escape from these concerns is as natural and necessary as sleep, and they feel neither compunction nor awkwardness in belonging for a while to the Taoist world of carefree hermits, wandering through the mountains like wind-blown clouds, with nothing to do but cultivate a row of vegetables, gaze at the drifting mist, and listen to the waterfalls. A few, perhaps, find the secret of bringing the two worlds together, of seeing the “hard realities” of human life to be the same aimless working of the Tao as the patterns of branches against the sky. In the words of Hung Tzu-ch’eng:

If the mind is not overlaid with wind and waves, you will always be living among blue mountains and green trees. If your true nature has the creative force of Nature itself, wherever you may go, you will see fishes leaping and geese flying.8


The style of garden which goes with Zen and cha-no-yu is not, of course, one of those ornate imitation landscapes with bronze cranes and miniature pagodas. The intention of the best Japanese gardens is not to make a realistic illusion of landscape, but simply to suggest the general atmosphere of “mountain and water” in a small space, so arranging the design of the garden that it seems to have been helped rather than governed by the hand of man. The Zen gardener has no mind to impose his own intention upon natural forms, but is careful rather to follow the “intentionless intention” of the forms themselves, even though this involves the utmost care and skill. In fact the gardener never ceases to prune, clip, weed, and train his plants, but he does so in the spirit of being part of the garden himself rather than a directing agent standing outside. He is not interfering with nature because he is nature, and he cultivates as if not cultivating. Thus the garden is at once highly artificial and extremely natural!

This spirit is seen at its best in the great sand and rock gardens of Kyoto, of which the most famous example is the garden of Ryoanji. It consists of five groups of rocks laid upon a rectangle of raked It consists of five groups of rocks laid upon a rectangle of raked sand, backed by a low stone wall, and surrounded by trees. It suggests a wild beach, or perhaps a seascape with rocky islands, but its unbelievable simplicity evokes a serenity and clarity of feeling so powerful that it can be caught even from a photograph. 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 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. Rocks picked out by the sensitive eye of the bonseki artist are ranked among Japan’s most precious national treasures, but, except to move them, they are untouched by the human hand. 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, they do 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.

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, 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. To this should be added the already mentioned letter on Zen and swordsmanship (kendo) by the seventeenth-century master Takuan, translated by Suzuki in his Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture.

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 wu-hsin and wu-nien, without “mind” and without blocking, or “choice.” After all those years of practice there came a day when it just happened–how, or why, Herrigel never understood.

The same is true in learning to use the brush for writing or painting. The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort. Similarly, in swordsmanship one must not first decide upon a certain thrust and then attempt to make it, since by that time it will be too late. Decision and action must be simultaneous. This was the point of Dogen’s image of firewood and ashes, for to say that firewood does not “become” ashes is to say that it has no intention to be ash before it is actually ash–and then it is no longer firewood. Dogen insisted that the two states were “clearly cut,” and in the same way Herrigel’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 za-zen 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 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.

Artists and craftsmen of the Far East have, indeed, measured, analyzed, and classified the techniques of the masters to such a degree that by deliberate imitation they can come close to “deceiving, if it were possible, even the elect.” By all quantitative standards the work so contrived is indistinguishable from its models, just as 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. For points of arrival are too abstract, too Euclidean to be enjoyed, 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 accomplishments. But, more than this, the real joy of them lies in what turns up unintentionally in the course of practice, just as the joy of travel is not nearly so much in getting where one wants to go as in the unsought surprises which occur on the journey.

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 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. For who controls the controller?

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 za-zen 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. Long before the origins of the Zen School, both Indian yoga and Chinese Taoism practiced “watching the breath,” with a view to letting–not forcing-it to become as slow and silent as possible. Physiologically and psychologically, the relationship between breathing and “insight” is not yet altogether clear. But if we look at man as process rather than entity, rhythm rather than structure, it is obvious that breathing is something which he does–and thus is–constantly. Therefore grasping air with the lungs goes hand-in-hand with grasping at life.

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.

One might go as far as to say that this way of breathing is Zen itself in its physiological aspect. Yet, as with every other aspect of Zen, it is hindered by striving for it, and for this reason beginners in the breathing technique often develop the peculiar anxiety of the breathing technique often develop the peculiar anxiety of feeling unable to breathe unless keeping up a conscious control. 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, as in others, every human activity can become a form of za-zen. The application of Zen in activity is not restricted to the formal arts, and, on the other hand, does not absolutely require the specific “sitting technique” of za-zen proper. The late Dr. Kunihiko Hashida, a lifelong student of Zen and editor of the works of Dogen, never used formal za-zen. But his “Zen practice” was precisely his study of physics, and to suggest his attitude he used to say that his lifework was “to science” rather than “to study science.”

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. We discover that the linear succession of time is a eternally real. We discover that the linear succession of time is a convention of our single-track verbal thinking, of a consciousness which interprets the world by grasping little pieces of it, calling them things and events. But every such grasp of the mind excludes the rest of the world, so that this type of consciousness can get an approximate vision of the whole only through a series of grasps, one after another. Yet the superficiality of this consciousness is seen in the fact that it cannot and does not regulate even the human organism. For if it had to control the heartbeat, the breath, the operation of the nerves, glands, muscles, and sense organs, it would be rushing wildly around the body taking care of one thing after another, with no time to do anything else. Happily, it is not in charge, and the organism is regulated by the timeless “original mind,” which deals with life in its totality and so can do ever so many “things” at once.

However, it is not as if the superficial consciousness were one thing, and the “original mind” another, for the former is a specialized activity of the latter. Thus the superficial consciousness can awaken to the eternal present if it stops grasping. But this does not come to pass by trying to concentrate on the present–an effort which succeeds only in making the moment seem ever more elusive and fleeting, ever more impossible to bring into focus. Awareness of the “eternal now” comes about by the same principle as the clarity of hearing and seeing and the proper freedom of the breath. Clear sight has nothing to do with trying to see; it is just the realization that the eyes will take in every detail all by themselves, for so long as they are open one can hardly prevent the light from reaching them. In the same way, there is no difficulty in being fully aware of the eternal present as soon as it is seen that one cannot possibly be aware of anything else–that in concrete fact there is no past or future. Making an effort to concentrate on the instantaneous moment implies at once that there are other moments. But they are nowhere to be found, and in truth one rests as easily in the eternal present as the eyes and ears respond to light and sound.

Now this eternal present is the “timeless,” unhurried flowing of the Tao–

Such a tide as, moving, seems to sleep,
Too full for sound or foam.


As Nan-ch’üan said, to try to accord with it is to deviate from it, though in fact one cannot deviate and there is no one to deviate. So, too, one cannot get away from the eternal present by trying to attend to it, and this very fact shows that, apart from this present, there is no distinct self that watches and knows it-which is why Huik’o could not find his mind when Bodhidharma asked him to produce it. However puzzling this may be, and however many philosophical problems it may raise, one clear look is enough to show its unavoidable truth. There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn round to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past. Therefore the Sixth Patriarch says in the T’an-ching:

In this moment there is nothing which comes to be. In this moment there is nothing which ceases to be. Thus there is no birth-and-death to be brought to an end. Wherefore the absolute tranquillity (of nirvana) is this present moment. Though it is at this moment, there is no limit to this moment, and herein is eternal delight. (7) k


Yet, when it comes to it, this moment can be called “present” only in relation to past and future, or to someone to whom it is present. But when there is neither past nor future, and no one to whom this moment is present, what is it? When Fa-ch’ang was dying, a squirrel screeched on the roof. “It’s just this,” he said, “and nothing else.”

_______________

Notes:

1 Cheng-tao Ke, 24.

2 Wu-men Kuan, 24.

3 This and all the following translations of haiku are the work of R. H. Blyth, and come for the most part from his superb work, the four-volume Haiku, which is without any question the best treatment of the subject in English. Blyth has the additional advantage of some experience in Zen training, and as a result his grasp of Chinese and Japanese literature is unusually perceptive. See Blyth (2) in the Bibliography.

4 R. H. Blyth in “Ikkyu’s Doka,” The Young East, vol. 2, no. 7. (Tokyo, 1953.)

5 An impression especially sickening to the poetic mood of the middle twentieth century. It comes, however, from a level of haiku and other art forms which corresponds to our own greeting-card verse and confectionery-box art. But consider the almost surrealistic imagery of the following from the Zenrin:

On Mount Wu-t’ai the clouds are steaming rice;
Before the ancient Buddha hall, dogs piss at heaven.


And there are many haiku such as this from Issa:

The mouth
That cracked a flea
Said, “Namu Amida Butsu!”


6 An influence combined with a native style which can still be seen at the ancient Shinto shrine of Ise–a style which strongly suggests the cultures of the southern Pacific islands.

7 Since it is frequently my pleasure to be invited for cha-no-yu by Sabro Hasegawa, who has a remarkable intuition for issuing these invitations at the most hectic moments, I can testify that I know no better form of psychotherapy.

8 Ts’ai-ken T’an, 291. Hung’s book of “vegetable-root talk” is a collection of wandering observations by a sixteenth-century poet whose philosophy was a blend of Taoism, Zen, and Confucianism.
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Re: The Way of Zen, by Alan Watts

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Bibliography is divided into two parts: (1) The principal original sources consulted in the preparation of this book. The Japanese pronunciations are in round brackets. References are to the Japanese edition of the complete Chinese Tripitaka, the Taisho Daizokyo in 85 volumes (Tokyo, 1924–1932), and to Nanjio’s Catalogue of the Chinese Translation of the Buddhist Tripitaka (Oxford, 1883; repr., Tokyo, 1929). (2) A general bibliography of works on Zen in European languages, together with some other works on Indian and Chinese philosophy to which reference has been made in this book. To the best of my knowledge, this section includes every important book or scholarly article on Zen published until the present time, July, 1956.

1. PRINCIPAL SOURCES

Cheng-tao Ke (Shodoka)
Song of the Realization of the Way.
Yung-chia Hsüan-chüeh (Yoka Genkaku), 665–713.
Taisho 2014.
Trans. Suzuki (6), Senzaki & McCandless (1).

Ching-te Ch’uan-teng Lu (Keitoku Dento Roku)
Record of the Transmission of the Lamp.
Tao-yüan (Dogen), c. 1004.
Taisho 2076. Nanjio 1524.

Daiho Shogen Kokushi Hogo
Sermons of the National Teacher Daiho Shogen (i.e., Bankei).
Bankei Zenji, 1622–1693.
Ed. Suzuki and Furata. Daito Shuppansha, Tokyo, 1943.
 
Hsin-hsin Ming (Shinjinmei)
Treatise on Faith in the Mind.
Seng-ts’an (Sosan), d. 606.
Taisho 2010.
Trans. Suzuki (1), vol. 1, and (6), and Waley in Conze (2).

Ku-tsun-hsü Yü-lu (Kosonshuku Goroku)
Recorded Sayings of the Ancient Worthies.
Tse (Seki), Sung dynasty.
Fu-hsüeh Shu-chü, Shanghai, n.d. Also in Dainihon Zokuzokyo, Kyoto, 1905–1912.

Lin-chi Lu (Rinzai Roku)
Record of Lin-chi.
Lin-chi I-hsüan (Rinzai Gigen), d. 867.
Taisho 1985. Also in Ku-tsun-hsü Yü-lu, fasc. 1.

Liu-tsu T’an-ching (Rokuso Dangyo)
Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.
Ta-chien Hui-neng (Daikan Eno), 638–713.
Taisho 2008. Nanjio 1525.
Trans. Wong Mou-lam (1) and Rousselle (1).

Pi-yen Lu (Hekigan Roku)
Record of the Green Rock.
Yuan-wu K’o-ch’in (Engo Kokugon), 1063–1135.
Taisho 2003.

Shen-hui Ho-chang I-chi (Jinne Osho Ishu)
Collected Traditions of Shen-hui.
Ho-tse Shen-hui (Kataku Jinne), 668–770.
Tun-huang MS, Pelliot 3047 and 3488.
Ed. Hu Shih. Oriental Book Co., Shanghai, 1930.
Trans. Gernet (1).

Shobo Genzo
The Eye Treasury of the True Dharma.
Dogen Zenji, 1200–1253.
Ed. Kunihiko Hashida. Sankibo Busshorin, Tokyo, 1939. Also in Dogen Zenji Zenshu, pp. 3–472. Shinjusha, Tokyo, 1940.

Wu-men Kuan (Mumon Kan)
The Barrier Without Gate.
Wu-men Hui-k’ai (Mumon Ekai), 1184–1260.
Taisho 2005.
Trans. Senzaki & Reps (1), Ogata (1), and Dumoulin (1).

2. WORKS IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

ANESAKI, M. History of Japanese Religion. Kegan Paul, London, 1930.

BENOIT, H. The Supreme Doctrine. Pantheon, New York, and Routledge, London, 1955.

BLYTH, R. H. (1) Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics. Hokuseido, Tokyo, 1948.
(2) Haiku. 4 vols. Hokuseido, Tokyo, 1949–1952.
(3) Buddhist Sermons on Christian Texts. Kokudosha, Tokyo, 1952.
(4) “Ikkyu’s Doka,” The Young East, vols. II. 2 to III. 9. Tokyo, 1952–1954.

CHAPIN, H. B. “The Ch’an Master Pu-tai,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. LIII, pp. 47–52.

CHU CH’AN (BLOFELD, J.) (1) The Huang Po Doctrine of Universal Mind. Buddhist Society, London, 1947.
(2) The Path to Sudden Attainment. Buddhist Society, London, 1948.

CH’U TA-KAO Tao Te Ching. Buddhist Society, London, 1937.

CONZE, E. (1) Buddhism: Its Essence and Development. Cassirer, Oxford, 1953.
(2) Buddhist Texts Through the Ages. Edited in conjunction with I. B. Horner, D. Snellgrove, and A. Waley. Cassirer, Oxford, 1954.
(3) Selected Sayings from the Perfection of Wisdom. Buddhist Society, London, 1955.

COOMARASWAMY, A. K. “Who Is Satan and Where Is Hell?” The Review of Religion, vol. XII. 1, pp. 76–87. New York, 1947.

DEMIÉVILLE, P. (1) Hobogirin. 4 fasc. Edited in conjunction with S. Levi and J. Takakusu. Maison Franco-Japonaise, Tokyo, 1928–1931.
(2) Le Concile de Lhasa. vol. I. Imprimerie Nationale de France, Paris, 1952.

DUMOULIN, H. (1) “Das Wu-men-kuan oder ‘Der Pass ohne Tor,’ ” Monumenta Serica, vol. VIII. 1943.
(2) “Bodhidharma und die Anfänge des Ch’an Buddhismus,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. VII. 1951.

DUMOULIN, H., & SASAKI, R. F. The Development of Chinese Zen after the Sixth Patriarch. First Zen Institute, New York, 1953.

DUYVENDAK, J. J. L. Tao Te Ching. Murray, London, 1954.

ELIOT, SIR C. Japanese Buddhism. Arnold, London, 1935.

FIRST ZEN INSTITUTE OF AMERICA. (1) Cat’s Yawn, 1940–1941.
Published in one vol., First Zen Institute, New York, 1947.
(2) Zen Notes. First Zen Institute, New York, since January, 1954.

FUNG YU-LAN (1) A History of Chinese Philosophy. 2 vols. Tr. Derk Bodde. Princeton, 1953.
(2) The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy. Tr. E. R. Hughes. Kegan Paul, London, 1947.

GATENBY, E. V. The Cloud Men of Yamato. Murray, London, 1929.

GERNET, J. (1) “Entretiens du Maître de Dhyana Chen-houei du Ho-tsö,” Publications de l’École Française d’Extrême- Orient, vol. XXXI. 1949.
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GILES, H. A. Chuang-tzu. Kelly & Walsh, Shanghai, 1926.

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HARRISON, E. J. The Fighting Spirit of Japan. Unwin, London, 1913.

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Hu SHIH (1) “The Development of Zen Buddhism in China,” Chinese Political and Social Review, vol. XV. 4. 1932.
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KEITH, SIR A. B. Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon. Oxford, 1923.

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LINSSEN, R. Essais sur le Bouddhisme en général et sur le Zen en particulier. 2 vols. Editions Etre Libre, Brussels, 1954.

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Re: The Way of Zen, by Alan Watts

Postby admin » Tue Aug 27, 2019 5:07 am

CHINESE NOTES: Read horizontally, from left to right

I. 1. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE TAO


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I. 2. THE ORIGINS OF BUDDHISM

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I. 3. MAHAYANA BUDDHISM

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I. 4. THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF ZEN

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II. 1. “EMPTY AND MARVELOUS”

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II. 2. “SITTING QUIETLY, DOING NOTHING”

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II. 3. ZA-ZEN AND THE KO-AN

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II. 4. THE ARTS OF ZEN

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