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ZEN and ZEN CLASSICS Volume Five 9262 NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE TRENT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY PRESENTED BY THE JAPAN FOUNDATION Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/zenzenclassics0005blyt From The Japan Foundation ZEN AND ZEN CLASSICS Volume Five Gathering Firewood, by Sosan The inscription, by the artist, says: Today the Western Mountain is crowded; They are cutting up the bones of the patri¬ archs and masters for fuel. I have no idea what weight [value] their burdens may have, But anyway the great thing is that the eternal spring is [once more] new. The picture shows a large number of Zen monks carrying brushwood, and seems to be a satire on the popularity of Zen. I could find nothing about Sosan himself. R. H. BL YTH ZEN AND ZEN CLASSICS Volume Five Twenty-five Zen Essays Trent University USwwy ffW«*OJ»OU«<Ht ©WT. THE HOKUSEIDO PRESS © 1962, by R. H. BLYTH ALL RIGHTS RESERVED First published, as Volume Seven of ZEN AND ZEN CLASSICS, 1962 Reprinted as Volume Five 1966 First Printing, 1962 Sixth Printing, 1979 ISBN 0-89346-052-4 Published by The Hokuseido Press 3-12, Kanda-Nishilricho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo Dedicated to Suzuki Daisetz, The only man who can write About Zen Without making me loathe it 34348^ l S' .. ' ' v ■ , . • ■ f •: ■ ; i KMi. - M.- ' - . - - - A A, - V ... k S PREFACE There is nothing harder to write about than Zen. No, this is not so. There is nothing harder than really to write, because really to write means to write by Zen. To write, or eat, or sing, or die by Zen is difficult. Really to write about Zen means writing by Zen about writing or eating or singing or dying by Zen. So to write about Zen is not difficult; what is difficult is to write by Zen. And if we don’t write by Zen we shouldn’t write at all. If we don’t live by Zen, there’s no point in living. What is Zen? Zen means doing anything perfectly, making mistakes perfectly, being defeated perfectly, hesitating perfectly, having stomach-ache perfectly, do¬ ing anything, perfectly or imperfectly, perfectly. What is the meaning of this perfectly? How does it differ from perfectly? Perfectly is in the will; perfectly is in the activity. Perfectly means that the activity is harmonious in all its parts, and fully achieves its proposed end. Perfectly means that at each moment of the activity there is no egoism in it, or rather, that our ego works together with the attraction and repul¬ sion of the Egoism of the nature within and without us. Our pain is not only our own pain; it is the pain of the universe. The “joy” of the universe is also our joy. Our failure or misjudgement is that of nature, which never hopes or despairs, but keeps on trying to the end, like Bruce’s spider, which failed to fall at last, or like Alfred’s cakes, which succeeded in being burnt to a cinder. Zen is at once irresistibly attractive and unutterably repulsive. Zen draws us to it for many reasons. First, because at last we have a belief which we need not believe in. No dogmas, no ritual, no mythology, no 7 8 Preface church, no priest, no holy book,—what a relief ! The sticks break, the stones crumble, The eternal altars tilt and tumble, Sanctions and tales dislimn like mist About the amazed evangelist. He stands unshook from age to youth Upon one pin-point of the truth. Second, Zen, even the word itself, enables us to perceive that all our deepest experiences of life, of music, of art, music, poetry, humour and so on, how¬ ever varied they may be, and deriving as they do from the most widely different circumstances, have all a similar “taste” or odour, a common element that seems fundamental. This idea is of course dangerous in its monistic, scientific, philosophical, unpoetical tendency, and we need all the more to insist upon the variety, the plurality, the disparateness of Zen. But we must have a unity as well as a diversity, and so the word Zen usually refers to this depth of oneness in our depth of life. But just as deep is our experience of difference. For a thing to exist at all it must have this separate¬ ness; at the same time it has no existence if only separate. Spengler describes the different “Zens” of the various world cultures, of which, with an instinct of genius (or it may be mere nationalism and misanthropy) he denies the inter-comprehensibility, that is, their essential identity. The same mistake is often made in regard to ego-lessness, in Japanese viu-ga. Egolessness alone won’t do, and to bring in the Over-Soul or something of that sort won’t do either, for if we pinch the Over-Soul it won’t shriek. What we want is something unpinchable and pinchable, and the ego is pinchable. So we must have muga, and at the same time yuga, egofulness; then we are all right, as Shakespeare was when he was Hamlet and at the same time Shakespeare, a Danish prince and an English playwright. Third (the third reason why Zen is so acceptable), Zen makes us realise that, as Hazlitt said, only “what Prejace 9 interests is interesting.” Zen is interest. Zen makes the mountains more mountainous, and the valleys more valeful, and yet at the same time the lower the mountain the better, and the shallower the valley. We begin to have an idea of what we have always been looking for without knowing it. When we read a novel or look at a statue or listen to a piano or a piccolo, even if we are ignorant of human nature or form-blind or tone-deaf, we know at least whether it is alive or not, whether it feeds us. Zen is the universal standard of judgement we have all been looking for. Zen is good taste. What is odious about Zen is what people say about it (all of them with the exception of Suzuki Daisetz); the photographs of Zen monks in their fanaticism, bigotry, superstition, and standardisation; the petti¬ fogging and infantile personal stories supposed to exemplify moments of enlightenment; the commentaries on the Hekiganroku and Mumonkan or koans, with their esotericism and superiority-complex; foreigners (no exceptions) who pretend to understand Zen, and bamboozle themselves and (some of) their readers by adding their own legs to the snake. Nobody under¬ stands Zen; nobody can explain it; writing books about it is effrontery and impertinence. In fact, Zen is itself a kind of impudence. On the other hand it is the essence of modesty, the modesty of nature. Let us combine the two. When I say what Zen is, or what it isn’t, or when I don’t say what it is or isn’t, it doesn’t matter. All that you, the reader, have to do is to agree with it. If I say, “Zen is a mouse when it spins,” or, “Zen is a spin when it mouses,” what is important is to agree with it whole-heartedly, with pleasure and gratitude, without reservation. Just agree with it, that is all. Or rather, agree with me. Love the good man, not his goodness; hate the bad man, not his badness. Zen means agreeing with everybody and everything, or rather, every thing. When we really “understand” a 10 Preface thing or a person, we agree with it. When we “under¬ stand” (the reason for) Communism or Christianity or Capitalism or Calligraphy, or Cabbages or Kings, we agree with it, we will it. Zen means willing all that is. We become like the higurashi, the day-darkener, the insect that sings the sun below the distant hills. If it does not cry night will not come. When we will a thing we become it, because a thing is itself by virtue of its “willing” to be what it is, or rather, as the higurashi shows us, what it is becoming. When someone agrees with me I know I am wrong. Rightness is unique, incommunicable, inimitable, unshareable, unrepeatable, right for that person in that place at that time only. We must agree with Hitler and with bed¬ bugs, and at the same time disagree with them, and Zen is this at-the-same-time-ness. Thus on the one hand, “Thy will, not mine, be done,” and on the other, “My will, not Thine, be done.” Everything must be as it is, but everything must be changed from what it is. Without love, without joy, without humour it is im¬ possible to please God, that is, write about Zen. But the reader also must do his part. Love must receive love, joy must receive joy, humour must receive humour. There is the Zen of giving and the Zen of receiving. It is said that it is more blessed to give than to receive, but blessedness is in any case not a matter of more or less, bless you! A few of the articles in the present volume have already appeared in The Young East and in Orient / West (Today’s Japan). I wish to thank the publishers of these magazines for their kind permission to reprint them. (Actually I didn’t ask them.) They have been carelessly revised, and a few mistakes and misprints added. R. H. Blyth 25 August 1961 CONTENTS Page PREFACE . 7 1. ZEN, CHRISTIANITY, AND BUDDHISM . 13 2. ZEN AND CULTURE.19 3. ! ZEN AND HUMOUR.30 4.
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