PASSAGES FROM ROBERT POWELL “ZEN AND REALITY”
There are Buddhists [or Tai Ji cowboy masters, or Qi Gong
performers, or herbal medicine men etc] in the West who would like nothing
better than to import Japanese Zen [Chinese Chan] lock, stock and barrel – with
its monasteries, koan techniques, etc. This, I think, would not only amount to
the height of absurdity but would go directly against the whole spirit of Zen.
Zen [Chan] is not static but flexible and expresses itself in different forms
according to time, place and circumstances. The important point is that Zen
grew to its present form in Japan as part and parcel of Japanese culture and
within this cultural framework developed as an historical necessity.
The principle of Zen being, “Let it settle itself – without
external moulding, or cultivation”, Zen must and, I think, will settle itself
also in the West and when left to do so grow into a form which will be found to
be hundred per cent appropriate to our cultural and historical background.
The essential thing to realize, however, is that in final
analysis it is only the Zen experience that counts – the approach and the
experience are still worlds apart. The former is confined within the limits of
conceptual thinking and as such liable to argument, to opinion – the
experience, however, is beyond the level of concepts and independent of space
and time. Consequently there is always a danger that the “preparation” of the
mind, the awakening of intelligence, which aims only at clearing away the
obstacles to the experience, is taken as an end in itself with the result that
one obstacle has only been replaced by another [sad!]. In Zen terminology this
is described as taking the finger which points to the Moon for the Moon.
We see this sort of pitfall clearly exemplified in certain
types of Yoga: one may read in Yoga literature, for example, that the carrying out
of certain exercises – breathing, meditating in a particular posture and what
not – is all that is required and bound to lead to enlightenment in the end if
only pursued long enough. In actual fact all these conscious efforts of the
mind to “get” enlightenment may well form the greatest hindrance to that
experience. The importation of Japanese techniques without more ado is almost
certain to lead to just such a situation. Once this damage is done and Zen has
become just another cult amongst many, we may wish we had never heard of
Japanese Zen methods.
We must face the fact that it is unfortunately not possible
to “teach” anybody to have the Zen experience. It is, however, possible to
point out some of the most formidable obstacles which stand in the way of that
experience, particularly for us in the West. In the main they are the following
three:-
There is first the general idea of gain in people’s minds as
when on first hearing of Zen they immediately ask “what do I get out of it?” In
other words, even Zen should serve them in the process of becoming; in looking
for a purpose in the future and thereby escaping from what is here and now. It
is this everlasting striving for fulfilment, to make purposeful what is
purposeless by setting up some goal which has to be attained at all costs, and
for which end we are even prepared to kill one another – it is this continuous
struggle that has fostered the delusion of the “me” and the “mine” and brought
about the effective isolation of the individual. The process has been operative
particularly in the West where competition for material wealth has always been
extremely severe, especially since the time of the Industrial Revolution.
A second obstacle is the tendency to question everything according
to a moral yardstick: something is either good, or it is evil, virtuous or
wicked. The desire for such facile classification is in actual fact based on an
undercurrent of righteousness – which is only another form of covering up our
feeling of emptiness, of nothingness – that is, the expression of a kind of
moral inferiority complex.
And third, there is the dualistic notion of body and mind,
mind and matter, which – as Easterners see it – is the malady of the West: we
are all suffering from this schizophrenia. Following from this we often have
arguments as to which is better; the Christian attitude of looking outward or
the Buddhist attitude of looking inward. But in reality there is no problem here:
there is no difference between outward and inward – this is all a delusion
based upon “thinking”, i.e. putting “things” in a space-time framework of reference
and upon the fallacious dualistic notion of body versus mind.
