Zen Buddhism is a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought. It is not religion or philosophy; it is not a psychology or a type of science. It is an example of what is known in India and China as a "way of liberation," and is similar in this respect to Taoism, Vendanta, and Yoga.
A way of liberation can have no positive definition. It has to be suggested by saying what is not, somewhat as a sculptor reveals an image by the act of removing pieces of stone from a block.
Historically, Zen may be regarded as the fulfillment of long traditions of Indian and Chinese culture, though it is actually much more Chinese than Indian, and, since the twelfth century, it has rooted itself deeply and most creatively in the culture o f Japan. As the fruition of these great cultures, and as a unique and peculiarly instructive example of a way of liberation, Zen is one of the most precious gifts of Asia to the world.
The origins of Zen are as much Taoist a Buddhist, and, because its flavor is so peculiarly Chinese, it may be best to begin by inquiring into its Chinese ancestry--illustrating, at the same time, what is meant by a way of liberation by the example of T aoism.
Much of the difficulty and mystification which Zen presents to the Western student is the result of his unfamiliarity with Chinese way of thinking--ways which differ startlingly from our own and which are, for that very reason, of special value to us i n attaining a critical perspective upon our own ideas. The problem here is not simply one of mastering different ideas, differing from our own as, say, the theories of Kant differ from those of Descartes, or those of Calvinists from those of Catholics. The problem is to appreciate differences in the basic premises of thought and in the very methods of thinking, and these are so often overlooked that our interpretations of Chinese philosophy are apt to be a projection of characteristically Western ideas into Chinese terminology. This is the inevitable disadvantage of studying Asian philosophy by the purely literary methods of Western scholarship, for words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.
The reason why Taoism and Zen present, at first sight, such a puzzle to the Western mind is that we have taken a restricted view of human knowledge. For Westerners, almost all knowledge is what a Taoist would call conventional knowledge, because we do not feel that we really know anything unless we can represent it to ourselves in words, or in some other system of conventional signs such as the notations of mathematics or music. Such knowledge is called conventional because it is a matter of social a greement as to the codes of communication. Just as people speaking the same language have tacit agreement as to what words shall stand for what things, so the members of every society and every culture are united by bonds of communication resting upon al l kinds of agreement as to the classification and valuation of action and things.
Now the general tendency of the Western mind is to feel that we do not really understand what we cannot represent, what we cannot communicate. For some reason Westerners do not trust and do not fully use the "peripheral vision" of our minds. Westerne rs learn music, for example, by restricting the whole range of tone and rhythm to a notation of fixed tonal and rhythmic intervals--a notation which is incapable of representing Oriental music. But the Oriental musician has a rough notation which he uses only as a reminder of a melody. He learns music, not by reading notes, but by listening to the performance of a teacher, getting the "feel" of it, and copying him, and this enables him to acquire rhythmic and tonal sophistications matched only by those Western jazz artists who use the same approach.
When we turn to ancient Chinese society, we find two "philosophical" traditions playing complementary parts--Confucianism and Taoism. Generally speaking, the former concerns itself with the linguistic, ethical, legal, and ritual conventions which prov ide the society with its system of communication. Confucianism, in other words, preoccupies itself with conventional knowledge, and under its auspices children are brought up so that their originally wayward and whimsical natures are made to fit the Proc rustean bed of the social order. The individual defines himself and his place in society in terms of the Confucian formulae.
Taoism on the other hand, is generally a pursuit of older men, and especially of men who are retiring from active life in the community. Their retirement from society is a kind of outward symbol of an inward liberation from the bounds of conventional patterns of thought and conduct. For Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.
Confucianism presides, then over the socially necessary task of forcing the original spontaneity of life into the rigid rules of convention-a task which involves not only conflict an pain, but also the loss of that peculiar naturalness and un-self-cons cious ness for which little children are so much loved, and which is sometimes regained by saints and sages. The function of Taoism is to undo the inevitable damage of this discipline, and not only to restore but also to develop the original spontaneity, which is termed tzu-jan or "self-so-ness." For the spontaneity of a child is still childish, like everything else about him. His education fosters his rigidity but not his spontaneity. In certain natures, the conflict between social convention and rep ressed spontaneity is so violent that it manifests itself in crime, insanity, and neurosis, which are the prices we pay for the otherwise undoubted benefits of order.
But Taoism must on no account be understood as a revolution against convention. Taoism is a way of liberation, which never comes by means of revolution, since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy. To be fr ee from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.
According to tradition, the originator of Taoism, Lao-tzu, was an older contemporary of Kung Fu-tzu, or Confucius, who died in 479 B.C. Lao-tzu is said to have been the author of the Tao Te Ching, a short book of aphorisms, setting forth the principle s of the Tao and its power or virtue (Te). But traditional Chines philosophy ascribes both Taoism and Confucianism to a still earlier source, to a work which lies at the very foundation of Chinese thought and culture, dating anywhere from 3000 to 1200 B. C. This is I Ching, or Book of Changes.
The I Ching is ostensibly a book of divination. It consists of oracles based on sixty-four abstract figures, each of which is composed of six lines. The lines are of two kinds--divided (negative) and undivided (positive)--and the six-line figures, or hexagrams, are believed to have been based on the various ways in which a tortoise shell will crack when heated. This refers to an ancient method of divination in which the soothsayer bored a hole in the back of a tortoise shell, heated it, and then for etold the future from the cracks in the shell so formed. For many centuries now the tortoise shell has fallen into disuse, and instead the hexagram appropriate to the moment in which a question is asked of the oracle is determined by the random division of a set of fifty yarrow stalks.
The important difference between the Tao and the usual idea of God is that whereas God produces the world by making (wei), the Tao produces it by "not-making" (wu-wei)--which is approximately what we mean by "growing." Because the natural universe wor ks mainly according to the principles of growth, it would seem quite odd to the Chinese mind to ask how it was made. If the universe were made, there would of course be someone who knows how it is made. But a universe which grows utterly excludes the po ssibility of knowing how it grows in the clumsy terms of thought and language, so that no Taoist would dream of asking whether the Tao knows how it produces the universe. For it operates according to spontaneity, not according to plan.
But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a (one-at-a-time) order of thought.
It is really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming, in a rather special sense, stupid. So long as the conscious intellect is frantically trying to clutch the world in its net of abstractions, and to insist that life be bou nd and fitted to its rigid categories, the mood of Taoism will remain incomprehensible.
The idea is not to reduce the human mind to a moronic vacuity, but to bring into play its innate and spontaneous intelligence by using it without forcing it. It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confucian thought that the natural man is to be trusted, and from their standpoint it appears that Western mistrust of human nature--whether theological or technological--is a kind of schizophrenia.
Te is the unthinkable ingenuity and creative power of man's spontaneous and natural functioning--a power which is blocked when one tries to master it in terms of formal methods and techniques. It is like the centipede's skill in using a hundred legs a t once.
A profound regard for te underlies the entire higher culture of the Far East, so much so that it has been made the basic principle of every kind of art and craft. While it is true that these arts employ what are, to us, highly difficult technical disc iplines, it is always recognized that they are instrumental and secondary, and that superior work has the quality of accident. What the culture of Taoism and Zen proposes is that one might become the kind of person who, without intending it, is a source of marvelous accidents.
Taoism is, then the original Chinese way of liberation which combined with Indian Mahayana Buddhism to produce Zen. It is a liberation from convention and of the creative power of te.
