The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [53]
Popularity almost invariably leads to a deterioration of quality, and as Zen became less of an informal spiritual movement and more of a settled institution, it underwent a curious change of character. It became necessary to “standardize” its methods and to find means for the masters to handle students in large numbers. There were also the special problems which arise for monastic communities when their membership increases, their traditions harden, and their novices tend more and more to be mere boys without natural vocation, sent for training by their pious families. The effect of this last factor upon the development of institutional Zen can hardly be underestimated. For the Zen community became less an association of mature men with spiritual interests, and more of an ecclesiastical boarding school for adolescent boys.
Under such circumstances the problem of discipline became paramount. The Zen masters were forced to concern themselves not only with the way of liberation from convention, but also with the instilling of convention, of ordinary manners and morals, in raw youths. The mature Western student who discovers an interest in Zen as a philosophy or as a way of liberation must be careful to keep this in mind, for otherwise he may be unpleasantly startled by monastic Zen as it exists today in Japan. He will find that Zen is a discipline enforced with the big stick. He will find that, although it is still an effective way of liberation at its “upper end,” its main preoccupation is with a disciplinary regimen which “trains character” in the same way as the old-fashioned British public school or the Jesuit novitiate. But it does the job remarkably well. The “Zen type” is an extremely fine type–as types go–self-reliant, humorous, clean and orderly to a fault, energetic though unhurried, and “hard as nails” without lack of keen aesthetic sensibility. The general impression of these men is that they have the same sort of balance as the Daruma doll: they are not rigid, but no one can knock them down.
Still another crucial problem arises when a spiritual institution comes into prosperity and power–the very human problem of competition for office and of who has the right to be a master. Concern for this problem is reflected in the writing of the Ch’uan Teng Lu, or “Record of the Transmission of the Lamp,” by Tao-yüan in about 1004. For one of the main objects of this work was to establish a proper “apostolic succession” for the Zen tradition, so that no one could claim authority unless his satori had been approved by someone who had been approved … right back to the time of the Buddha himself.
Nothing, however, is more difficult than establishing proper qualifications in the imponderable realm of spiritual insight. Where the candidates are few the problem is not so grave, but where one master is responsible for some hundreds of students the process of teaching and testing requires standardization. Zen solved this problem with remarkable ingenuity, employing a means which not only provided a test of competence but–what was much more–a means of transmitting the Zen experience itself with a minimum of falsification.
This extraordinary invention was the system of the kung-an ee (Japanese, koan) or “Zen problem.” Literally, this term means a “public document” or “case” in the sense of a decision creating a legal precedent. Thus the koan system involves “passing” a series