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More quotations from Christmas Humphries.
Zen is the apotheosis of Buddhism. This direct assault upon the citadel of Truth, without reliance upon concepts (of God or soul or salvation), or the use of scripture, ritual or vow, is unique.
So fierce, indeed, is the Zen technique, and so scornful of the usual apparatus of religion, that it has been doubted whether Zen is a Buddhist School at all. The task in hand is the breaking down of the bars of the intellect that the mind may be freed for the light of Enlightenment.
In Zen the familiar props of religion are cast away. The purpose of Zen is to pass beyond the intellect. The intellect has its uses and it is an essential faculty of the human mind. But just as the emotions have their use and abuse, their range of usefulness and a limit to that range, so the intellect, by which men reach to the stars in science and philosophy, must pause and fail at the gates of spiritual knowledge. For the intellect can learn about it but can never, as the finest intellects discover, KNOW.
What KNOWS? The answer is Buddhi, the faculty of direct awareness [intuition, metaphysical or spiritual intelligence]. The intellect is itself a device or means, and Zen is the way of direct enlightenment. All must be freely abandoned before the seeker finds. Even the fact of seeking, and the will to find.
Bodhidharma, known as Daruma in Japan, expressed his teaching in four lines of verse:
A special transmission outside the Scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the soul of man;
Seeing into one’s own nature.
First the intellect must be transcended - for it is where the intellect pauses, baffled and at bay, that Zen begins. The intellect is a developed instrument for the use of knowledge, but only the senses and the intuition acquire knowledge at first hand. The thought-machine, therefore, too easily becomes a cage, a workshop for the handling of second-hand material.
Just as the senses acquire direct experience by touch and taste and the like [what I would call feelings], so Buddhi, intuition, acquires direct experience [often through those ‘feelings’ - often through feeling awe and wonder in response to sensory stimulus] and KNOWS.
In the ideal process of development, this higher faculty [Buddhi] increasingly illumines the thinking mind; in usual practice the intellect claims a final validity and closes its doors to direct experience. Hence Zen is largely a breaking into the closed doors of the human mind to let the light without flood in, and any and every process that will shock the mind into such an opening is useful and may be used.
Zen has produced its own techniques for the sudden path to Satori, the Zen name for Enlightenment. The two most famous devices of Rinzai Zen (less used in the Soto branch) are the MONDO, a form of rapid question and answer between Master and pupil, and the KOAN, a compressed form of mondo - a question, word or phrase that is insoluble by or unintelligible to the intellect. [e.g. What’s the sound of one hand clapping? Most of the questions we ask ourselves are pretty stupid. ‘Why am I here?’ Duh! ‘What is God?’]
‘How shall I escape from the wheel of birth and death?’ asked a pupil? The Master asked in reply, ‘Who puts you under restraint?’ A laugh, an oath, a shout, a shaking, even a blow may do what years of ‘meditation’ have failed to achieve.
Asked why he meditated all day long, a pupil replied that he desired to become a Buddha. The Master picked up a brick and began to rub it. Asked what he was doing he explained that he wished to make a mirror. ‘But no amount of polishing will make a mirror!’ ‘If so, no amount of sitting cross-legged will make thee a Buddha’, was the deep reply.
[Mondos and Koans tend to produce dialogue or interactions that appear to be basically nonsense - that is non-sense - which is the essence of Zen. Intuition and direct experience - metaphysical intelligence - are ways of directly KNOWING that don’t require mediation by ‘sense’ - meaning intellectual or verbal or conceptual or analytical means.]
Sense is the product of reasoning and logic, of the laws of thought; Zen roars with laughter at all of them. Zen is the joke in a joke, and cannot, like a joke, be ‘explained’. It is the life within the form; it is that which reasoning tries to enshrine and frequently strangles. It is the river of life that cares not for the palaces of thought, the dictionaries and definitions, the understanding or the decisions of those upon its banks.
Zen technique, therefore, is like an explosive, designed to break the log-jam in the river, to let the waters flow freely, and all who flow with them ride free.
Theravada Buddhist philosophy is all arranged in three of this and four of that with a twelve-fold Chain of Causation. Very neat, says the Zen practitioner, but as Dr Suzuki says, ‘The Buddha was not the mere discoverer of the Twelvefold Chain of Causation: he took the chain in his hands and broke it into pieces, so that it would never again bind him to slavery’. In Zen the emphasis is on the breaking and not on the chain.
All objects, of thought or emotion, whether things we touch or the things that stand in our mental way, must sooner or later be smashed and removed. As the Master Rinzai himself proclaimed, ‘Do not get yourself entangled with any object, but stand above, pass on, and be free’. All phrases, dogmas, formulas; all schools and codes; all systems of thought and philosophy, all ‘isms’ including Buddhism, all these are means to the end of KNOWING, and easily become [though are not easily perceived as] obstacles in the way.
Zen technique is designed to develop the mind to the limits of thought and then to drive it to the verge of the precipice, where thought can go no further. Why not go over? For only then can WE go on, and progress is a walking on and on to the Goal.
It is true that at a later stage one learns that there is no walking and no Goal, but that is Zen . . . . Meanwhile, until we achieve the goal of purposelessness, let us have this purpose: Said the Master Ummon to his monks, ‘If you walk, just walk; if you sit, just sit. But don’t wobble!’
[The Zen attitude is that we need to focus in the Now, and give our full attention to whatever we are doing, so as to do it, whatever it is, properly. The assumption is that we only choose to do the things in life that are important and necessary to us at a given time, and we should cease to endlessly worry about things we’ve done in the past, or may do in the future. ‘By our actions you shall know us’, and we should ensure that our actions are proper and good, even if they are only walking or sitting. We can’t change the past, we can’t control the future, but we can be mindful of ourselves from moment to moment, and ensure that our lives are well lived in the present.]
