The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [66]
There is, no doubt, some parallel between these demonstrations and the viewpoint of Korzybskian semantics. There is the same stress on the importance of avoiding confusion between words and signs, on the one hand, and the infinitely variable “unspeakable” world, on the other. Class demonstrations of semantic principles often resemble types of mondo. Professor Irving Lee, of Northwestern University, used to hold up a matchbox before his class, asking “What’s this?” The students would usually drop squarely into the trap and say, “A matchbox!” At this Professor Lee would say, “No, no! It’s this–” throwing the matchbox at the class, and adding, “Matchbox is a noise. Is this a noise?”
However, it would seem that Korzybski still thought of the “unspeakable” world as a multiplicity of infinitely differentiated events. For Zen, the world of “suchness” is neither one nor many, neither uniform nor differentiated. A Zen master might hold up his hand–to someone insisting that there are real differences in the world–and say, “Without saying a word, point to the difference between my fingers.” At once it is clear that “sameness” and “difference” are abstractions. The same would have to be said of all categorizations of the concrete world–even “concrete” itself–for such terms as “physical,” “material,” “objective,” “real,” and “existential” are extremely abstract symbols. Indeed, the more one tries to define them, the more meaningless they turn out to be.
The world of “suchness” is void and empty because it teases the mind out of thought, dumfounding the chatter of definition so that there is nothing left to be said. Yet it is obvious that we are not confronted with literal nothingness. It is true that, when pressed, every attempt to catch hold of our world leaves us empty-handed. Furthermore, when we try to be sure at least of ourselves, the knowing, catching subjects, we disappear. We cannot find any self apart from the mind, and we cannot find any mind apart from those very experiences which the mind–now vanished–was trying to grasp. In R. H. Blyth’s arresting metaphor, when we were just about to swat the fly, the fly flew up and sat on the swatter. In terms of immediate perception, when we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things. For a moment we are paralyzed, because it seems that we have no basis for action, no ground under foot from which to take a jump. But this is the way it always was, and in the next moment we find ourselves as free to act, speak, and think as ever, yet in a strange and miraculous new world from which “self” and “other,” “mind” and “things” have vanished. In the words of Te-shan:
Only when you have no thing in your mind and no mind in things are you vacant and spiritual, empty and marvelous.21 m
The marvel can only be described as the peculiar sensation of freedom in action which arises when the world is no longer felt to be some sort of obstacle standing over against one. This is not freedom in the crude sense of “kicking over the traces” and behaving in wild caprice. It is the discovery of freedom in the most ordinary tasks, for when the sense of subjective isolation vanishes, the world is no longer felt as an intractable object.
Yün-men once said, “Our school lets you go any way you like. It kills and it brings to life–either way.”
A monk then asked, “How does it kill?”
The master replied, “Winter goes and spring comes.”
“How,” asked the monk, “is it when winter goes and spring comes?”
The master said, “Shouldering a staff you wander this way and that, East or West, South or North, knocking at the wild stumps as you please.”22 n
The passing of the seasons is not passively suffered, but “happens” as freely as one wanders in the fields, knocking