The World as Just So, Part 1: To Say What Can’t Be Said

A lecture on Zen is always something in the nature of a hoax, because it really does deal with a domain of experience that can’t be talked about. But one must remember, at the same time, that there’s really nothing at all that can be talked about adequately. And the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said. So every poet—every artist—feels, when he gets to the end of his work, that there’s something absolutely essential that was left out. So Zen has always described itself as a finger pointing at the moon.

In the Sanskrit saying tat tvam asi, ‘that art thou,’ Zen is concerned with ‘that.’ ‘That,’ of course, is the word which is used for ‘Brahman,’ the absolute reality in Hindu philosophy. And you’re it—only in disguise, and disguised so well that you’ve forgotten it. But unfortunately, ideas like the Ultimate Ground of Being, the Self, Brahman, Ultimate Reality, the Great Void—all that is very, very abstract talk, and Zen is concerned with a much more direct way of coming to an understanding of ‘that.’ Or ‘thatness,’ as it’s called; tathātā in Sanskrit.

So Zen has been summed up in four statements:

a direct transmission outside scriptures and apart from tradition,
no dependence on words and letters,
direct pointing to the human mind,
and seeing into one’s own nature and becoming Buddha, that is, becoming enlightened—awakened—from the normal hypnosis under which almost all of us go ’round like somnambules.
It’s extraordinary how much interest has existed in Zen in the United States, especially in the years since the war with Japan. And, naturally, I’ve often meditated on the reasons for this interest. I think, first of all, the appeal of Zen lies in its unusual quality of humor. Religions aren’t, as a rule, humorous in any way. Religions are serious. And when one looks at Zen art and reads Zen stories it is quite apparent that something is going on here which isn’t serious in the ordinary sense, however sincere it may be.

The next thing I think has appealed to Westerners is that Zen has no doctrines. There is nothing you have to believe, and it doesn’t moralize at you very much. It’s not particularly concerned with morals at all. It’s a field of inquiry rather like physics. And you don’t expect a physicist to discuss authoritatively about morals even though, as a human being, he has moral interests and problems. But as a physicist he is not a moral authority. Or, if you go to an oculist, or ophthalmologist, to have your eyes adjusted—that is so you can see clearly. And Zen is spiritual ophthalmology.

Another thing that appeals very much to Western students about Zen is that they read their Zen from Suzuki, and from some of my writings, and from R. H. Blyth, and these people present a rather different kind of Zen from that which you will find today in Japan. They present what is essentially early Chinese Zen from the old writings, ranging from about shortly before 700 A.D. to 1000 A.D. And that Zen has a very different flavor from modern Japanese Zen, and so, of course, many of the people who go to study Zen in Japan disapprove of Dr. Suzuki thoroughly. And also, naturally, of my exposition of Zen, because we don’t make a great fetish of studying Zen by sitting.

In Japan, today, they sit and they sit and they sit. R. H. Blyth asked a Zen master, What would you do if you had only one half hour left to live? And he [the Zen master] said, I would do zazen, which means he would sit like a Buddha, here, and practice meditation. And Blyth had given him several choices: Would you like to listen to your favorite music? Would you have a dinner? Would you get drunk? Would you like the company of a beautiful woman? Would you take a walk? What would you do? Or would you just go on with your daily business as if nothing was going to happen? In other words, would you wind up your watch? So he [Blyth] was very disappointed in this answer. And he said, You know, sitting is only one way of doing Zen.

Buddhism speaks of the four dignities of man: walking, standing, sitting, and lying. And so zazen is simply the Japanese word for ‘sitting Zen.’ There must also be walking Zen, standing Zen, and lying Zen. You should know, for example, how to sleep in a Zen way: that means to sleep thoroughly. Zen has been described as, When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep. And when the student got that description he said, Well, doesn’t everybody do that? And the master said, They don’t. When hungry, they don’t just eat but think of 10,000 things. When tired, they don’t just sleep but dream innumerable dreams.

So, in a sense, this sounds like the old Western truism whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. But that’s not the same thing as Zen. A lot of people like to see if they could sum up Zen in that way. In the Latin motto of the school I used to go to in England: age dum agis, ‘act when you act,’ or while you act.

There’s a famous story which beautifully illustrates the current relationships between East and West. Paul Reps, who wrote—or rather, drew—a lovely book called Zen Telegrams, once asked a Zen master to sum up Buddhism in one phrase. And he said, Don’t act, but act. So Reps was simply delighted because he thought the master had said, Don’t act but act. And that, of course, would be the Taoist principle of wú wéi (無爲), of action in the spirit of not being separate from the world. Realizing so fully that you are the universe, too—that your action on it is not an interference, but an expression of the totality. But the master’s English was very bad indeed, and Paul Reps had misunderstood him. He had said, Don’t act bad act. And, you know, that is the sort of attitude that all clergy develop over the centuries. You know how it is when you go to church—if you do—so often the sermon boils down to, My dear people, you ought to be good. And everybody knows that—but hardly anybody knows how, or even what, ‘good’ is.