PASSAGES FROM ALAN WATTS “THE WAY OF ZEN”
Taoism, Confucianism and Zen are expressions of a mentality
which feels completely at home in this universe, and which sees man as an
integral part of his environment. Human intelligence is … an aspect of the
whole intricately balanced organism of the natural world, whose principles were
first explored in the “Book of Changes”. Heaven and earth are alike members of
this organism, and nature is as much our father as our mother, since the Tao by
which it works is originally manifested in the “yang” and the “yin” – the male
and female, positive and negative principles which, in dynamic balance,
maintain the order of the world. The insight which lies at the root of Far
Eastern culture is that opposites are relational and so fundamentally
harmonious. Conflict is always comparatively superficial, for there can be no
ultimate conflict when the pairs of opposites are mutually interdependent. Thus
our stark divisions of spirit and nature, subject and object, good and evil,
artist and medium are quite foreign to this culture.
In a universe whose fundamental principle is relativity
rather than warfare there is no purpose because there is no victory to be won,
no end to be attained. For every end, as the word itself shows, is an extreme,
an opposite, and exists only in relation to its other end. Because the world is
not going anywhere there is no hurry. One may as well “take it easy” like
nature itself, and in the Chinese language the “changes” of nature and “ease”
are the same word, “i”. This is a first principle in the study of Zen and of
any Far Eastern art: hurry, and all that it involves, is fatal. For there is no
goal to be attained. The moment a goal is conceived it becomes impossible to
practice the discipline of the art, to master the very rigour of its technique.
Under the watchful and critical eye of a master one may practise the writing of
Chinese characters for days and days, months and months. But he watches as a
gardener watches the growth of a tree, and wants his student to have the
attitude of the tree – the attitude of purposeless growth in which there are no
short cuts because every stage of the way is both beginning and end. Thus the
most accomplished master no more congratulates himself upon “arriving” than the
most fumbling beginner.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no
content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying,
the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and
no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world. Absence of
hurry also involves a certain lack of interference with the natural course of
events, especially when it is felt that the natural course follows principles
which are not foreign to human intelligence. For, as we have seen, the Taoist mentality
makes, or forces, nothing but “grows” everything. When human reason is seen to
be the expression of the same spontaneous balance of “yang” and “yin” as the
natural universe, man’s action upon his environment is not felt as a conflict,
an action from outside. Thus the difference between forcing and growing cannot
be expressed in terms of specific directions as to what should or should not be
done, for the difference lies primarily in the quality and feeling of the
action. The difficulty of describing these things for Western ears is that
people in a hurry cannot feel …
… A world which increasingly consists of destinations
without journeys between them, a world which values only “getting somewhere” as
fast as possible, becomes a world without substance. One can get anywhere and
everywhere, and yet the more this is possible, the less is anywhere and
everywhere worth getting to. For points of arrival are too abstract, too
Euclidean to be enjoyed, and it is all very much like eating the precise ends
of a banana without getting what lies in between. The point, therefore, of
these arts is the doing of them rather than the accomplishments. But, more than
this, the real joy of them lies in what turns up unintentionally in the course
of practice, just as the joy of travel is not nearly so much in getting where
one wants to go as in the unsought surprises which occur on the journey.
