The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [52]
And on creating karma through seeking liberation–
Outside the mind there is no Dharma, and inside also there is nothing to be grasped. What is it that you seek? You say on all sides that the Tao is to be practiced and put to the proof. Don’t be mistaken! If there is anyone who can practice it, this is entirely karma making for birth-and-death. You talk about being perfectly disciplined in your six senses and in the ten thousand ways of conduct, but as I see it all this is creating karma. To seek the Buddha and to seek the Dharma is precisely making karma for the hells.41 aa
In Ma-tsu, Nan-ch’üan, Chao-chou, Huang-po, and Lin-chi we can see the “flavor” of Zen at its best. Taoist and Buddhist as it is in its original inspiration, it is also something more. It is so earthy, so matter-of-fact, and so direct. The difficulty of translating the records of these masters is that their style of Chinese is neither classical nor modern, but rather the colloquial speech of the T’ang dynasty. Its “naturalness” is less refined, less obviously beautiful than that of the Taoist sages and poets; it is almost rough and common. I say “almost” because the expression is not really correct. We are at a loss for parallels from other cultures for comparison, and the Western student can best catch its flavor through observing the works of art which it was subsequently to inspire. The best image might be a garden consisting of no more than an expanse of raked sand, as a ground for several unhewn rocks overgrown with lichens and moss, such as one may see today in the Zen temples of Kyoto. The media are the simplest imaginable; the effect is as if man had hardly touched it, as if it had been transported unchanged from the seashore; but in practice only the most sensitive and experienced artist can achieve it. This sounds, of course, as though “Zen flavor” were a studied and affected primitivism. Sometimes it is. But the genuine Zen flavor is when a man is almost miraculously natural without intending to be so. His Zen life is not to make himself but to grow that way.
Thus it should be obvious that the “naturalness” of these T’ang masters is not to be taken just literally, as if Zen were merely to glory in being a completely ordinary, vulgar fellow who scatters ideals to the wind and behaves as he pleases–for this would in itself be an affectation. The “naturalness” of Zen flourishes only when one has lost affectedness and self-consciousness of every description. But a spirit of this kind comes and goes like the wind, and is the most impossible thing to institutionalize and preserve.
Yet in the late T’ang dynasty the genius and vitality of Zen was such that it was coming to be the dominant form of Buddhism in China, though its relation to other schools was often very close. Tsung-mi (779–841) was simultaneously a Zen master and the Fifth Patriarch of the Hua-yen School, representing the philosophy of the Avatamsaka Sutra. This extremely subtle and mature form of Mahayana philosophy was employed by Tungshan (807–869) in developing the doctrine of the Five Ranks (wu-wei bb), concerning the fivefold relationship of the absolute (cheng cc) and the relative (p’ien dd), and was related by his student Ts’ao-shan (840–901) to the philosophy of the I Ching, the Book of Changes. Fa-yen (885–958) and Fen-yang (947–1024) were also influential masters who made a deep study of the Hua-yen, and to this day it constitutes as it were the intellectual aspect of Zen. On the other hand, such masters as Te-chao (891–972) and Yen-shou (904–975) maintained close relations with the T’ien-t’ai and Pure Land Schools.
In 845 there was a brief but vigorous