A drunken man who falls out of a cart, though he may suffer, does not die. His bones are the same as other people’s; but he meets the accident in a different way. His spirit is in a condition of security. He is not conscious of riding in the cart; neither is he conscious of falling out of it. Ideas of life, death, fear, etc., cannot penetrate his breast; and so he does not suffer from contact with objective existences. And if such security is to be got from wine, how much more is it to be got from Spontaneity.


The centipede was happy, quite,
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?” This worked his mind to such a pitch,
He lay distracted in a ditch,
Considering how to run.


“Where there is an object, there thought arises.” Is then the thought one thing, and the object another? No, what is the object, just that is the thought. If the object were one thing, and the thought another, then there would be a double state of thought. So the object itself is just thought. Can then thought review thought? No, thought cannot review thought. As the blade of a sword cannot cut itself, as a finger- tip cannot touch itself, so a thought cannot see itself.

There is often a deceptive resemblance between opposite extremes. Lunatics frequently resemble saints, and the unaffected modesty of the sage often lets him seem to be a very ordinary person. Yet there is no easy way of pointing out the difference, of saying what it is that the ordinary, worldly fellow does or does not do which makes him different from a Bodhisattva, or vice versa. The entire mystery of Zen lies in this problem, and we shall return to it at the proper time. It is enough to say here that the so-called “ordinary person” is only apparently natural, or perhaps that his real naturalness feels unnatural to him. In practice it is simply impossible to decide, intentionally, to stop seeking for nirvana and to lead an ordinary life, for as soon as one’s “ordinary” life is intentional it is not natural.

Pure Land Buddhism is clearly an outgrowth of the Bodhisattva doctrine that the proper work of the liberated man is the liberation of all other beings by upaya or “skillful means.” By prajna or intuitive wisdom he sees into the nature of reality, and this in turn awakens karuna or compassion for all who are still in the bonds of ignorance. At its deepest level karuna means something rather more than compassion for the ignorance of others. For we saw that the Bodhisattva’s return into the world of samsara was based on the principle that samsara is in fact nirvana, and that “the void is precisely form.” If prajna is to see that “form is void,” karuna is to see that “the void is form.” It is therefore an “affirmation” of the everyday world in its natural “suchness,” and this is one of the features of the Mahayana most strongly emphasized in Zen. Indeed, it makes nonsense of the idea that Buddhism is always a philosophy of world-denial, in which the uniqueness of forms has no importance. It was because of karuna that Mahayana Buddhism became the principal inspiration of Chinese art in the Sung and Yüan dynasties, an art which stressed natural forms rather than religious symbols. For by karuna it is seen that the dissolution of forms into the void is in no way different from the particular characteristics of the forms themselves. The life of things is only conventionally separable from their death; in reality the dying is the living.

One must start by “getting the feel” of relativity, and by knowing that life is not a situation from which there is anything to be grasped or gained–as if it were something which one approaches from outside, like a pie or a barrel of beer. To succeed is always to fail–in the sense that the more one succeeds in anything, the greater is the need to go on succeeding. To eat is to survive to be hungry.

Men feel themselves to be victims or puppets of their experience because they separate “themselves” from their minds, thinking that the nature of the mind- body is something involuntarily thrust upon “them.” They think that they did not ask to be born, did not ask to be “given” a sensitive organism to be frustrated by alternating pleasure and pain. But Zen asks us to find out “who” it is that “has” this mind, and “who” it was that did not ask to be born before father and mother conceived us. Thence it appears that the entire sense of subjective isolation, of being the one who was “given” a mind and to whom experience happens, is an illusion of bad semantics–the hypnotic suggestion of repeated wrong thinking. For there is no “myself” apart from the mind-body which gives structure to my experience. It is likewise ridiculous to talk of this mind-body as something which was passively and involuntarily “given” a certain structure. It is that structure, and before the structure arose there was no mind-body.

Man’s identification with his idea of himself gives him a specious and precarious sense of permanence. For this idea is relatively fixed, being based upon carefully selected memories of his past, memories which have a preserved and fixed character. Social convention encourages the fixity of the idea because the very usefulness of symbols depends upon their stability. Convention therefore encourages him to associate his idea of himself with equally abstract and symbolic roles and stereotypes, since these will help him to form an idea of himself which will be definite and intelligible. But to the degree that he identifies himself with the fixed idea, he becomes aware of “life” as something which flows past him–faster and faster as he grows older, as his idea becomes more rigid, more bolstered with memories. The more he attempts to clutch the world, the more he feels it as a process in motion.

The morning glory which blooms for an hour Differs not at heart from the giant pine, Which lives for a thousand years.

According to the famous saying of Ch’ing-yüan:
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.

But to keep up the supply of information in the memory, the mind- body must continue to act “on its own.” It must not cling too closely to its own record. There must be a “lag” or distance between the source of information and the source of action. This does not mean that the source of action must hesitate before it accepts the information. It means that it must not identify itself with the source of information. We saw that when the furnace responds too closely to the thermostat, it cannot go ahead without also trying to stop, or stop without also trying to go ahead. This is just what happens to the human being, to the mind, when the desire for certainty and security prompts identification between the mind and its own image of itself. It cannot let go of itself. It feels that it should not do what it is doing, and that it should do what it is not doing. It feels that it should not be what it is, and be what it isn’t. Furthermore, the effort to remain always “good” or “happy” is like trying to hold the thermostat to a constant 70 degrees by making the lower limit the same as the upper.

But reflection is also action, and Yün-men might also have said, “In
acting, just act. In thinking, just think. Above all, don’t wobble.” In other words, if one is going to reflect, just reflect–but do not reflect about reflecting. Yet Zen would agree that reflection about reflection is also action–provided that in doing it we do just that, and do not tend to drift off into the infinite regression of trying always to stand above or outside the level upon which we are acting. Thus Zen is also a liberation from the dualism of thought and action, for it thinks as it acts–with the same quality of abandon, commitment, or faith. The attitude of wu-hsin is by no means an anti-intellectualist exclusion of thinking. Wu-hsin is action on any level whatsoever, physical or psychic, without trying at the same moment to observe and check the action from outside. This attempt to act and think about the action simultaneously is precisely the identification of the mind with its idea of itself. It involves the same contradiction as the statement which states something about itself–“This statement is false.”

The same is true of the relationship between feeling and action. For feeling blocks action, and blocks itself as a form of action, when it gets caught in this same tendency to observe or feel itself indefinitely–as when, in the midst of enjoying myself, I examine myself to see if I am getting the utmost out of the occasion. Not content with tasting the food, I am also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy, I want to feel myself feeling happy–so as to be sure not to miss anything.

Suzuki has translated a long letter from the Zen master Takuan on the relationship of Zen to the art of fencing, and this is certainly the best literary source of what Zen means by mo chih ch’u, by “going straight ahead without stopping.”13 Both Takuan and Bankei stressed the fact that the “original” or “unborn” mind is constantly working miracles even in the most ordinary person. Even though a tree has innumerable leaves, the mind takes them in all at once without being “stopped” by any one of them. Explaining this to a visiting monk, Bankei said, “To prove that your mind is the Buddha mind, notice how all that I say here goes into you without missing a single thing, even though I don’t try to push it into you.” When heckled by an aggressive Nichiren monk who kept insisting that he couldn’t understand a word, Bankei asked him to come closer. The monk stepped forward, “Closer still,” said Bankei. The monk came forward again. “How well,” said Bankei, “you understand me!”15 In other words, our natural organism performs the most marvelously complex activities without the least hesitation or deliberation. Conscious thought is itself founded upon its whole system of spontaneous functioning, for which reason there is really no alternative to trusting oneself completely to its working. Oneself is its working.

As another Zenrin poem says:
There’s nothing equal to wearing clothes and eating food.
Outside this there are neither Buddhas nor Patríarchs.

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.

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.

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 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.”

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 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.

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.

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.

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.”