The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [60]
To the dualistic mode of thought it will therefore seem that the standpoint of Zen is that of fatalism as opposed to free choice. When Mu-chou was asked, “We dress and eat every day, and how do we escape from having to put on clothes and eat food?” he answered, “We dress; we eat.” “I don’t understand,” said the monk. “If you don’t understand, put on your clothes and eat your food.” 5 d On being asked how to escape from the “heat,” another master directed the questioner to the place where it is neither hot nor cold. When asked to explain himself he replied, “In summer we sweat; in winter we shiver.” Or, as a poem puts it:
When cold, we gather round the hearth before the blazing fire;
When hot, we sit on the bank of the mountain stream in the bamboo grove.6 e
And from this point of view one can
See the sun in the midst of the rain;
Scoop clear water from the heart of the fire.f
But the viewpoint is not fatalistic. It is not simply submission to the inevitability of sweating when it is hot, shivering when it is cold, eating when hungry, and sleeping when tired. Submission to fate implies someone who submits, someone who is the helpless puppet of circumstances, and for Zen there is no such person. The duality of subject and object, of the knower and the known, is seen to be just as relative, as mutual, as inseparable as every other. We do not sweat because it is hot; the sweating is the heat. It is just as true to say that the sun is light because of the eyes as to say that the eyes see light because of the sun. The viewpoint is unfamiliar because it is our settled convention to think that heat comes first and then, by causality, the body sweats. To put it the other way round is startling, like saying “cheese and bread” instead of “bread and cheese.” Thus the Zenrin Kushu says:
Fire does not wait for the sun to be hot
Nor the wind for the moon, to be cool.
This shocking and seemingly illogical reversal of common sense may perhaps be clarified by the favorite Zen image of “the moon in the water.” The phenomenon moon-in-the-water is likened to human experience. The water is the subject, and the moon the object. When there is no water, there is no moon-in-the-water, and likewise when there is no moon. But when the moon rises the water does not wait to receive its image, and when even the tiniest drop of water is poured out the moon does not wait to cast its reflection. For the moon does not intend to cast its reflection, and the water does not receive its image on purpose. The event is caused as much by the water as by the moon, and as the water manifests the brightness of the moon, the moon manifests the clarity of the water. Another poem in the Zenrin Kushu says:
Trees show the bodily form of the wind;
Waves give vital energy to the moon.g
To put it less poetically–human experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals. Men feel themselves to be victims or puppets of their experience because they separate “themselves” from their minds, thinking that the nature of the mind-body is something involuntarily thrust upon “them.” They think that they did not ask to be born, did not ask to be “given” a sensitive organism to be frustrated by alternating pleasure and pain. But Zen asks us to find out “who” it is that “has” this mind, and “who” it was that did not ask to be born before father and mother conceived us. Thence it appears that the entire sense of subjective isolation, of being the one who was “given” a mind and to whom experience happens, is an illusion of bad semantics–the hypnotic suggestion of repeated wrong thinking. For there is no “myself” apart from the mind-body which gives structure to