The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [68]
The blue mountains are of themselves blue mountains;
The white clouds are of themselves white clouds. 0
In its stress upon naturalness, Zen is obviously the inheritor of Taoism, and its view of spontaneous action as “marvelous activity” (miao-yung d) is precisely what the Taoists meant by the word te–“virtue” with an overtone of magical power. But neither in Taoism nor in Zen does it have anything to do with magic in the merely sensational sense of performing superhuman “miracles.” The “magical” or “marvelous” quality of spontaneous action is, on the contrary, that it is perfectly human, and yet shows no sign of being contrived.
Such a quality is peculiarly subtle (another meaning of miao), and extremely hard to put into words. The story is told of a Zen monk who wept upon hearing of the death of a close relative. When one of his fellow students objected that it was most unseemly for a monk to show such personal attachment he replied, “Don’t be stupid! I’m weeping because I want to weep.” The great Hakuin was deeply disturbed in his early study of Zen when he came across the story of the master Yen-t’ou, who was said to have screamed at the top of his voice when murdered by a robber.1 Yet this doubt was dissolved at the moment of his satori, and in Zen circles his own death is felt to have been especially admirable for its display of human emotion. On the other hand, the abbot Kwaisen and his monks allowed themselves to be burned alive by the soldiers of Oda Nobunaga, sitting calmly in the posture of meditation. Such contradictory “naturalness” seems most mysterious, but perhaps the clue lies in the saying of Yün-men: “In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble.” For the essential quality of naturalness is the sincerity of the undivided mind which does not dither between alternatives. So when Yen-t’ou screamed, it was such a scream that it was heard for miles around.
But it would be quite wrong to suppose that this natural sincerity comes about by observing such a platitude as “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.” When Yen-t’ou screamed, he was not screaming in order to be natural, nor did he first make up his mind to scream and then implement the decision with the full energy of his will. There is a total contradiction in planned naturalness and intentional sincerity. This is to overlay, not to discover, the “original mind.” Thus to try to be natural is an affectation. To try not to try to be natural is also an affectation. As a Zenrin poem says:
You cannot get it by taking thought;
You cannot seek it by not taking thought.e
But this absurdly complex and frustrating predicament arises from a simple and elementary mistake in the use of the mind. When this is understood, there is no paradox and no difficulty. Obviously, the mistake arises in the attempt to split the mind against itself, but to understand this clearly we have to enter more deeply into the “cybernetics” of the mind, the basic pattern of its self-correcting action.
It is, of course, part of the very genius of the human mind that it can, as it were, stand aside from life and reflect upon it, that it can be aware of its own existence, and that it can criticize its own processes. For the mind has something resembling a “feed-back” system. This is a term used in communications engineering for one of the basic principles of “automation,” of enabling machines to control themselves. Feed-back enables a machine to be informed of the effects of its own action in such a way as to be able to correct its action. Perhaps the most familiar example is the electrical thermostat which regulates the heating of a house. By setting an upper and a lower limit of desired temperature, a thermometer is so connected that it will switch the furnace on when the lower limit is reached, and off when the upper limit is reached. The temperature of the house is thus kept within the desired limits. The thermostat provides the furnace with a kind of sensitive organ–an extremely rudimentary analogy of hurnan self-consciousness.2