The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [73]
Like the empty sky it has no boundaries,
Yet it is right in this place, ever profound and clear.
When you seek to know it, you cannot see it.
You cannot take hold of it,
But you cannot lose it.
In not being able to get it, you get it.
When you are silent, it speaks;
When you speak, it is silent.
The great gate is wide open to bestow alms,
And no crowd is blocking the way. (34) h
It was through seeing this that, in the moment of his satori, Hakuin cried out, “How wondrous! How wondrous! There is no birth-and-death from which one has to escape, nor is there any supreme knowledge after which one has to strive!”8 Or in the words of Hsiang-yen:
At one stroke I forgot all my knowledge!
There’s no use for artificial discipline,
For, move as I will, I manifest the ancient Way.9 i
Paradoxically, nothing is more artificial than the notion of artificiality. Try as one may, it is as impossible to go against the spontaneous Tao as to live in some other time than now, or some other place than here. When a monk asked Bankei what he thought of disciplining oneself to attain satori, the master said, “Satori stands in contrast to confusion. Since each person is the substance of Buddha, (in reality) there is not one point of confusion. What, then, is one going to achieve by satori?”10
Seeing, then, that there is no possibility of departing from the Tao, one is like Hsüan-chüeh’s “easygoing” man who
Neither avoids false thoughts nor seeks the true,
For ignorance is in reality the Buddha nature,
And this illusory, changeful, empty body is the Dharmakaya.11
One stops trying to be spontaneous by seeing that it is unnecessary to try, and then and there it can happen. The Zen masters often bring out this state by the device of evading a question and then, as the questioner turns to go, calling him suddenly by name. As he naturally replies, “Yes?” the master exclaims, “There it is!”
To the Western reader it may seem that all this is a kind of pantheism, an attempt to wipe out conflicts by asserting that “everything is God.” But from the standpoint of Zen this is a long way short of true naturalness since it involves the use of the artificial concept–“everything is God” or “everything is the Tao.” Zen annihilates this concept by showing that it is as unnecessary as every other. One does not realize the spontaneous life by depending on the repetition of thoughts or affirmations. One realizes it by seeing that no such devices are necessary. Zen describes all means and methods for realizing the Tao as “legs on a snake”–utterly irrelevant attachments.
To the logician it will of course seem that the point at which we have arrived is pure nonsense–as, in a way, it is. From the Buddhist point of view, reality itself has no meaning since it is not a sign, pointing to something beyond itself. To arrive at reality–at “suchness”–is to go beyond karma, beyond consequential action, and to enter a life which is completely aimless. Yet to Zen and Taoism alike this is the very life of the universe, which is complete at every moment and does not need to justify itself by aiming at something beyond. In the words of a Zenrin poem:
If you don’t believe, just look at September, look at October!
The yellow leaves falling, falling, to fill both mountain and river.j
To see this is to be like the two friends of whom another Zenrin
poem says:
Meeting, they laugh and laugh–
The forest grove, the many fallen leaves! k
To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
Furthermore, the Zen experience is more of a conclusion than a premise. It is never to be used as the first step in a line of ethical or metaphysical reasoning, since conclusions draw to it rather than from it. Like the Beatific Vision of Christianity, it is a “which than which there is