Zen by Alan Watts

Author:Alan Watts [Watts, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843337140
Amazon: 1843337142
Goodreads: 316882
Published: 2019-06-10T16:46:04+00:00

direct pointing

The Zen way of teaching is to demonstrate Reality rather than to talk about it, or, if words are used at all, to avoid formally religious terminology and conceptual statements. When Zen speaks it expresses Reality, not with logical explanations and doctrines but with everyday conversation, or with statements that upset the normal conceptual mode of thinking so violently that they appear as utter nonsense. Because 43

ZEN

Zen desires to get rid of concepts, to shatter the rigid frames in which we try to possess life, it employs a thoroughgoing iconoclasm. At the same time, Zen as a formal religious cult reads the scriptures, uses images and ceremonies, and sometimes breaks down far enough to include sermons and explanations. But it is just the preservation of this formal aspect of religion which makes the informal and iconoclastic such a puzzling and effective contrast, a truth which Western reformers and iconoclasts have never appreciated.

The greater part of Zen literature consists of mondo, of brief dialogues between masters and pupils, which illustrate its peculiar method of instruction, pointing to the real now without interposing ideas and notions about it. Here, for example, is the way in which Zen deals with the problem of non-duality, concerning which Indian Buddhism has composed so many volumes of intricate explanation.

A monk asked Dosan, “How do we escape the heat when summer comes and the cold when winter is here?”

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Direct Pointing

The master said, “Why not go where there is no summer, no winter?”

“Where is such a place?”

“When the cold season comes, one is thoroughly chilled; when the hot summer is here, one swelters.”

As to escaping from Samsara, the world of opposites and everyday consciousness, to Nirvana, the realm of absolute unity and peace, Zen has this to say: Bokuju was once asked, “We have to dress and eat every day, and how can we escape from all that?”

The master replied, “We dress; we eat.”

“I do not understand.”

“If you do not understand, put on your dress and eat your food.”

Or again:

“Pray show me the way to deliverance.”

“Who has ever put you in bondage?”

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ZEN

“Nobody.”

“If so, why should you ask for deliverance?”

Another master deals with this question rather more explicitly, but we must be careful that he does not fool us:

Hui-hai was asked, “How can one attain the Great Nirvana?”

“Have no karma that works for trans-

migration.”*

“What is the karma for transmigration?”

“To seek after the Great Nirvana, to abandon the defiled and take to the undefiled, to assert that there is something attainable and something realizable, not to be free from the

*

Karma (literally, action) is the law of causality, and thus the phrase

“karma that works for transmigration” means the kind of action which has the effect of binding the agent to Samsara, where, according to general Buddhist belief, man is born again and again into the world until he realizes Nirvana.

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Direct Pointing

teaching of opposites — this is the karma that works for transmigration.”

“How can one be emancipated?”

“No bondage from the very first, and

what is the use of seeking emancipation? Act as you will, go on as you feel — without second thought.

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