The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [83]
By such means the student is at last brought to a point of feeling completely stupid–as if he were encased in a huge block of ice, unable to move or think. He just knows nothing; the whole world, including himself, is an enormous mass of pure doubt. Everything he hears, touches, or sees is as incomprehensible as “nothing” or “the sound of one hand.” At sanzen he is perfectly dumb. He walks or sits all day in a “vivid daze,” conscious of everything going on around him, responding mechanically to circumstances, but totally baffled by everything.
After some time in this state there comes a moment when the block of ice suddenly collapses, when this vast lump of unintelligibility comes instantly alive. The problem of who or what it is becomes transparently absurd–a question which, from the beginning, meant nothing whatever. There is no one left to ask himself the question or to answer it. Yet at the same time this transparent meaninglessness can laugh and talk, eat and drink, run up and down, look at the earth and sky, and all this without any sense of there being a problem, a sort of psychological knot, in the midst of it. There is no knot because the “mind seeking to know the mind” or the “self seeking to control the self” has been defeated out of existence and exposed for the abstraction which it always was. And when that tense knot vanishes there is no more sensation of a hard core of selfhood standing over against the rest of the world. In this state, the roshi needs only a single look at the student to know that he is now ready to begin his Zen training in earnest.
It is not quite the paradox which it seems to say that Zen training can begin only when it has been finished. For this is simply the basic Mahayana principle that prajna leads to karuna, that awakening is not truly attained unless it also implies the life of the Bodhisattva, the manifestation of the “marvelous use” of the Void for the benefit of all sentient beings.
At this point the roshi begins to present the student with koan which ask for impossible feats of action or judgment, such as:
“Take the four divisions of Tokyo out of your sleeve.”
“Stop that ship on the distant ocean.”
“Stop the booming of the distant bell.”
“A girl is crossing the street. Is she the younger or the older sister?”
Such koan are rather more obviously “tricky” than the basic introductory problems, and show the student that what are dilemmas for thought present no barriers to action. A paper handkerchief easily becomes the four divisions of Tokyo, and the student solves the problem of the younger or older sister by mincing across the room like a girl. For in her absolute “suchness” the girl is just that; she is only relatively “sister,” “older,” or “younger.” One can perhaps understand why a man who had practiced za-zen for eight years told R. H. Blyth that “Zen is just a trick of words,” for on the principle of extracting a thorn with a thorn Zen is extricating people from the tangle in which they find themselves from confusing words and ideas with reality.
The continued practice of za-zen now provides the student with a clear, unobstructed mind into which he can toss the koan like a pebble into a pool and simply watch to see what his mind does with it. As he concludes each koan, the roshi usually requires that he present a verse from the Zenrin Kushu which expresses the point of the koan just solved. Other books are also used, and the late Sokei-an Sasaki, working in the United States, found that an admirable manual for this purpose was Alice in Wonderland!. As the work goes on, crucial koan alternate with subsidiary koan which explore the implications of the former, and give the student