Buddhism the Religion of No-Religion by Alan Watts

Author:Alan Watts
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-8048-3203-8
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

BUDDHISM AS DIALOGUE

CHAPTER FOUR

I want to proceed now with a discussion of the particular subset of Mahayana Buddhism that is known as Zen Buddhism.

Zen plays a little game with you. Whenever I or somebody like D. T. Suzuki talks about Zen, all the others say that because we’re talking about it we do not understand it. In the words of Lao-tzu, “Those who know do not say; those who say do not know,” and though he said that, he wrote a book of eighty chapters or so to explain the Tao and the te, its power. We can’t help ourselves; we’ve got to talk. Human beings are chatterboxes. When we have something on our minds, we have to talk about it, even if we can’t say what we mean.

Poetry is the great language. It is the art of saying what cannot be said. Every poet knows that he is trying to describe the indescribable. Every poet knows that nothing is describable. Whether you take some sort of ineffable mystical experience at one extreme, or an ordinary rusty nail at the other, nothing is really describable. In the words of the famous Count Korzybski, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t.”

There used to be a professor at Northwestern who would produce a matchbook in front of his class and say, “What is this?” The students would say, “A match-book.” And he would say, “No, no, no. ‘Matchbook’ is a noise. Is this a noise? What is it really?” And to answer this, he would throw it at them. That is what it was.

So nothing can really be described, and yet we all know perfectly well what we mean when we talk. If you have shared an experience with somebody else, then of course you can talk about it. We can all talk about fire and air and water and wood because we know what they are, and there is no mystery. In the same way, something so esoteric as Zen can be discussed. Zen people play games or little tricks, however, and test each other. I remember the first time I met Paul Reps, who wrote that lovely book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. He said to me, “You’ve written quite a number of books by now, you must think you’re pretty fancy.” I said, “I haven’t said a word.” This is simply a Zen game where people feel each other out. A poem says, “When two Zen masters meet each other on the road, they need no introduction; thieves recognize one another instantaneously.”

If I were to give you a truly proper and educated talk about Zen, I would gather you around and sit here in silence for five minutes and leave. This would be a much more direct exposition of it than what I am going to do instead, which is to talk about it. I am afraid that you would feel disappointed and somewhat cheated if I just left after five minutes of silence though.

The word zen is the Japanese

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