The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East by Alan Watts

Author:Alan Watts [Watts, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781852741143
Google: DzqMPwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0802130569
Barnesnoble: 0802130569
Goodreads: 530451
Published: 2019-10-19T00:27:26+00:00

The Technique of Zen

it is cold. It will be a joy inexpressible.’ The important phrase in this quotation is ‘letting go your hold’. For if the Koan is taken to be a way of presenting in miniature the giant Koan of life, the great dilemma and problem at which every being is working, however unconsciously, then, in the same way as life itself, the Koan can never be grasped. The Zen masters distinguished between two kinds of phrases (chii)-the dead and the living-the dead being those which were amenable to logical analysis and solution, and the living being those which could never be confined to any fixed system of interpretation.

Koans belong to the second type, for they share in life’s elusiveness and indefmability. Thus when the disciple comes to the final point where the Koan absolutely refuses to be grasped, he comes also to the realization that life can never be grasped, never possessed or made to stay still. Whereupon he ‘lets go’, and this letting go is the acceptance of life as life, as that which cannot be made anyone’s property, which is always free and spontaneous and unlimited. The Koan is a wa of presenting the central roblem of life in an orm. or t e ma impasse o t e Koan, o t e “ving phrase, magnifies the impasse always reached by those who try to clutch anything that is alive in their desire that it may be possessed and made to surrender its own life to theirs. Yet they can never take hold of its life; all that they can have is its corpse, which must in time decay also. Therefore the Zen disciple is given something which cannot be killed by dcfmition and analysis; he must try to grasp it alive, and the moment he realizes, fmally and absolutely, that it cannot be grasped, he lets

in a flash what a fool he has

been to

the

of all

to live

to

own. Thus at this moment he attains freedom the suffering

75

The Spirit of Zen

attempt to shut the wind in a box, to keep life alive without letting it live.

There are, of course, various degrees of Sa tori, and in order to reach the highest of these it is necessary to work with many Koans. There are said to be 1, 700 of these Koans and though it will hardly be necessary for the disciple to solve all of them before his nnderstanding of Zen is complete, it is exceedingly rare that one alone is sufficient to achieve the fmal Satori.

In the early stages of Zen practice the flash of enlightenment will last only for a few seconds, while as time goes on it will become more permanent, nntil at last the disciple has a Satori which sweeps away every shadow of doubt and uncertainty. There are certain similarities between Satori and the ‘Sudden Conversion’ of Christianity. William James gives some remarkable instances of this in his Varieties of Religious Experience, and it is interesting to compare them with the records left by the Zen masters.

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