Alan watts way of zen pdf free download

Blyth observes—it seems not so bad after all. The world of facts and events is altogether nama, abstract names, and rupa, uid form. It escapes both the comprehension of the philosopher and the grasp of the pleasure-seeker like water from a clutching st. It is precisely this realization of the total elusiveness of the world which lies at the root of Buddhism.

There was simply a tradition, embodied in the orally transmitted doctrine! Furthermore, he was being entirely traditional in his abandonment of caste and in accepting a following of casteless and homeless students. For the Indian tradition, even more than the Chinese, speci cally encourages the abandonment of the conventional life at a certain age, after the duties of family and citizenship have been ful lled.

From the standpoint of Zen, this experience is the essential content of Buddhism, and the verbal doctrine is quite secondary to the wordless transmission of the experience itself from generation to generation. All his e orts had been in vain. The eternal atman, the real Self, was not to be found. However much he concentrated upon his own mind to nd its root and ground, he found only his own e ort to concentrate.

Thereupon he felt at once that a profound change was coming over him. He sat beneath the tree, vowing never to rise until he had attained the supreme awakening, and-according to a tradition-sat all through the night until the rst glimpse of the morning star suddenly provoked a state of perfect clarity and understanding.

Yet the actual content of this experience was never and could never be put into words. For words are the frames of maya, the meshes of its net, and the experience is of the water which slips through. For his real message remained always unspoken, and was such that, when words attempted to express it, they made it seem as if it were nothing at all. In its own probably rather late tradition, Zen maintains that the Buddha transmitted awakening to his chief disciple, Mahakasyapa, by holding up a ower and remaining silent.

The Pali Canon, however, relates that immediately after his awakening the Buddha went to the Deer Park at Benares, and set forth his doctrine to those who had formerly been his companions in the ascetic life, expressing it in the form of those Four Noble Truths which provide so convenient a summary of Buddhism. Birth is duhkha, decay is duhkha, sickness is duhkha, death is duhkha, so also are sorrow and grief. Not to get what one desires, this also is duhkha. In a word, this body, this vefold aggregation based on clutching trishna , this is duhkha.

These two terms are of basic importance. The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes. Reality in itself is neither permanent nor impermanent; it cannot be categorized. In the same way, the anatman doctrine is not quite the bald assertion that there is no real Self atman at the basis of our consciousness.

The point is rather that there is no Self, or basic reality, which may be grasped, either by direct experience or by concepts. Apparently the Buddha felt that the doctrine of the atman in the Upanishads lent itself too easily to a fatal misinterpretation.

It became an object of belief, a desideratum, a goal to be reached, something to which the mind could cling as its one nal abode of safety in the ux of life. It is fundamental to every school of Buddhism that there is no ego, no enduring entity which is the constant subject of our changing experiences. We can, for example, imagine the path of a bird through the sky as a distinct line which it has taken. But this line is as abstract as a line of latitude.

In concrete reality, the bird left no line, and, similarly, the past from which our ego is abstracted has entirely disappeared. Thus any attempt to cling to the ego or to make it an e ective source of action is doomed to frustration. The Second Noble Truth relates to the cause of frustration, which is said to be trishna, clinging or grasping, based on avidya, which is ignorance or unconsciousness.

Now avidya is the formal opposite of awakening. It is the state of the mind when hypnotized or spellbound by maya, so that it mistakes the abstract world of things and events for the concrete world of reality. At a still deeper level it is lack of self-knowledge, lack of the realization that all grasping turns out to be the futile e ort to grasp oneself, or rather, to make life catch hold of itself.

For to one who has self-knowledge, there is no duality between himself and the external world. This is really a simple problem of what we now call cybernetics, the science of control. Mechanically and logically it is easy to see that any system approaching perfect self-control is also approaching perfect self-frustration. The statement circulates fatuously forever, since it is always true to the extent that it is false, and false to the extent that it is true.

Expressed more concretely, I cannot throw a ball so long as I am holding on to it—so as to maintain perfect control of its movement.

Thus the desire for perfect control, of the environment and of oneself, is based on a profound mistrust of the controller. Avidya is the failure to see the basic self-contradiction of this position. From it therefore arises a futile grasping or controlling of life which is pure self-frustration, and the pattern of life which follows is the vicious circle which in Hinduism and Buddhism is called samsara, the Round of birth-and-death.

Man is involved in karma when he interferes with the world in such a way that he is compelled to go on interfering, when the solution of a problem creates still more problems to be solved, when the control of one thing creates the need to control several others.

Many Buddhists understand the Round of birth-and-death quite literally as a process of reincarnation, wherein the karma which shapes the individual does so again and again in life after life until, through insight and awakening, it is laid to rest. But in Zen, and in other schools of the Mahayana, it is often taken in a more gurative way, as that the process of rebirth is from moment to moment, so that one is being reborn so long as one identi es himself with a continuing ego which reincarnates itself afresh at each moment of time.

Thus the validity and interest of the doctrine does not require acceptance of a special theory of survival. Its importance is rather that it exempli es the whole problem of action in vicious circles and its resolution, and in this respect Buddhist philosophy should have a special interest for students of communication theory, cybernetics, logical philosophy, and similar matters.

The Third Noble Truth is concerned with the ending of self- frustration, of grasping, and of the whole viciously circular pattern of karma which generates the Round. The ending is called nirvana, a word of such dubious etymology that a simple translation is exceedingly di cult.

The two latter interpretations seem, on the whole, to make most sense. Thus nirvana is the equivalent of moksha, release or liberation. Seen from one side, it appears to be despair-the recognition that life utterly defeats our e orts to control it, that all human striving is no more than a vanishing hand clutching at clouds.

If nirvana is related to the cessation nir- of turnings vritti , the term is synonymous with the aim of yoga, de ned in the Yogasutra as citta vritti nirodha—the cessation of turnings of the mind.

Yoga is the practice of trying to stop these thoughts by thinking about them, until the utter futility of the process is felt so vividly that it simply drops away, and the mind discovers its natural and unconfused state. It is obvious, however, that both etymologies give us the same essential meaning.

Nirvana is the way of life which ensues when clutching at life has come to an end. In so far as all de nition is clutching, nirvana is necessarily inde nable.

More popularly and literally understood, nirvana is the disappearance of the being from the Round of incarnations, not into a state of annihilation, but simply into a state escaping definition, and thus immeasurable and infinite. To attain nirvana is also to attain Buddhahood, awakening. But this is not attainment in any ordinary sense, because no acquisition and no motivation are involved. It is impossible to desire nirvana, or to intend to reach it, for anything desirable or conceivable as an object of action is, by definition, not nirvana.

A Buddha, therefore, is a man of no rank. He is not above, like an angel; he is not below, like a demon. He does not appear anywhere in the six divisions of the Round, and it would be mistaken to think of him as superior to the angels, for the law of the Round is that what goes up must come down, and vice versa.

He has transcended all dualities whatsoever, and thus it would mean nothing to him to think of himself as a superior person or a spiritual success. We therefore have: 1 Samyag-drishti, or complete view. Without discussing these sections in detail, it may simply be said that the rst two are concerned with a proper understanding of the doctrine and of the human situation.

Samyak-samadhi, the last section of the path, is the perfection of the rst, signifying pure experience, pure awareness, wherein there is no longer the dualism of the knower and the known. It is a total clarity and presence of mind, actively passive, wherein events come and go like reflections in a mirror: nothing is reflected except what is.

In walking, standing, sitting, or lying down he understands that he is so doing, so that, however his body is engaged, he understands it just as it is. There is not the mind on the one hand and its experiences on the other: there is just a process of experiencing in which there is nothing to be grasped, as an object, and no one, as a subject, to grasp it. Seen thus, the process of experiencing ceases to clutch at itself.

Thought follows thought without interruption, that is, without any need to divide itself from itself, so as to become its own object. No, what is the object, just that is the thought. If the object were one thing, and the thought another, then there would be a double state of thought. So the object itself is just thought. Can then thought review thought? No, thought cannot review thought.

As the blade of a sword cannot cut itself, as a nger-tip cannot touch itself, so a thought cannot see itself. Most images of the Buddha show him in the posture of sitting meditation, in the particular attitude known as padmasana, the posture of the lotus, with the legs crossed and the feet resting, soles upward, upon the thighs. From a Buddhist standpoint, it is simply the proper way to sit, and it seems perfectly natural to remain sitting so long as there is nothing else to be done, and so long as one is not consumed with nervous agitation.

To propitiate this restless conscience, sitting meditation must therefore be regarded as an exercise, a discipline with an ulterior motive. Yet at that: very point it ceases to be meditation dhyana in the Buddhist sense, for where there is purpose, where there is seeking and grasping for results, there is no dhyana.

The best solution seems to be to leave dhyana untranslated and add it to the English language as we have added Nirvana and Tao. On the one hand, it is one-pointed in the sense of being focused on the present, since to clear awareness there is neither past nor future, but just this one moment ekaksana which Western mystics have called the Eternal Now.

On the other hand, it is one-pointed in the sense of being a state of consciousness without di erentiation of the knower, the knowing, and the known. A Tathagata i. So too with the heard, the sensed, and the known: he does not think of them in these categories. We are so accustomed to this convention in speaking and thinking that we fail to recognize that it is simply a convention, and that it does not necessarily correspond to the actual experience of knowing.

But dhyana as the mental state of the liberated or awakened man is naturally free from the confusion of conventional entities with reality. The error is conventional, not existential. Once again, therefore, we see how convention, how the maya of measurement and description, populates the world with those ghosts which we call entities and things.

So hypnotic, so persuasive is the power of convention that we begin to feel these ghosts as realities, and make of them our loves, our ideals, our prized possessions. But the anxiety-laden problem of what will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my st when I open my hand, or where my lap goes when I stand up. Oxford, The translation is from R.

Gri th. Thus ignorance avidya gives rise to motivation samskara , and this in series to consciousness vijnana , name-and-form namarupa , the six senses shadayatana , sense stimulation sparsa , sense experience vedana , grasping trishna , possessiveness upadana , coming-to-be bhava , birth jati , and old-age-and-death jaramarana , which again gives rise to avidya.

The Buddha explained that avidya was put rst on the list, not because it was the temporal beginning of the series, but for simple convenience of exposition. The whole series arises together, and its terms exist only in relation to one another. In Conze 2 , p. The rst four involve the progressive settling of conception vitakka and discursive thought vicara into a state of equanimity upekkha through the practice of samadhi. In other words, as the mind returns to its natural state of integrity and non-duality, it ceases to clutch at experience with the symbols of discursive thought, It simply perceives without words or concepts.

At the time of his death, the Buddha is said to have entered into parinirvana i. The Buddha did not attempt to set forth a consistent philosophical system, trying to satisfy that intellectual curiosity about ultimate things which expects answers in words. Such a view of the genesis of Mahayana Buddhism is, however, rather misleading. Certainly the treatment of these problems is highly scholastic, and the intellectual level of the Mahayana texts is very lofty. But the consistent aim is to bring about the experience of liberation, not to construct a philosophical system.

But at root it is the work of highly sensitive and perceptive minds studying their own inner workings. To anyone who is highly self-aware, the Buddhism of the Pali Canon leaves many practical problems unanswered. Its psychological insight goes little further than the construction of analytical catalogues of mental functions, and though its precepts are clear it is not always helpful in explaining their practical di culties.

Perhaps it is too sweeping a generalization, but one receives the impression that whereas the Pali Canon would unlock the door to nirvana by sheer e ort, the Mahayana would jiggle the key until it turns smoothly.

How and when the Mahayana doctrines arose is a matter of historical guesswork. The great Mahayana sutras are ostensibly the teachings of the Buddha and his immediate disciples, but their style is so di erent and their doctrine so much more subtle than that of the Pali Canon that scholars almost unanimously assign them to later dates.

There is no evidence of their existence in the time of the great Buddhist emperor Asoka, grandson of Chandragupta Maurya, who was converted to Buddhism in B.

The principal Mahayana texts were being translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva shortly after A. The traditional Mahayanist account of its own origin is that its teachings were delivered by the Buddha to his intimate disciples but their public revelation withheld until the world was ready for them.

Apparent contradictions between earlier and later doctrines are explained by assigning them to di erent levels of truth, ranging from the most relative to the absolute, and of which the probably quite late Avatamsaka School distinguishes no less than ve.

However, the problem of the historical origins of the Mahayana is of no very direct importance for an understanding of Zen, which, as a Chinese rather than Indian form of Buddhism, came into being when Indian Mahayana was fully grown.

We can pass on, therefore, to the central Mahayana doctrines from which Zen arose. The Mahayana distinguishes itself from the Buddhism of the Pali Canon by terming the latter the Little hina Vehicle yana of liberation and itself the Great maha Vehicle-great because it comprises such a wealth of upaya, or methods for the realization of nirvana. These methods range from the sophisticated dialectic of Nagarjuna, whose object is to free the mind of all xed conceptions, to the Sukhavati or Pure Land doctrine of liberation through faith in the power of Amitabha, the Buddha of Boundless Light, who is said to have attained his awakening many aeons before the time of Gautama.

It may be attributed to laziness and loss of nerve, but it seems more plausible to suggest that those who remained in the path of self-deliverance were merely unconscious of the paradox involved. Various indications suggest that one of the earliest notions of the Mahayana was the conception of the Bodhisattva, not simply as a potential Buddha, but as one who by renouncing nirvana was at a higher spiritual level than one who attained it and so withdrew from the world of birth-and-death.

The Bodhisattva, however, is one who realizes that there is a profound contradiction in a nirvana attained by himself and for himself.

From the popular standpoint, the Bodhisattva became a focus of devotion bhakti , a savior of the world who had vowed not to enter the nal nirvana until all other sentient beings had likewise attained it.

For their sakes he consented to be born again and again into the Round of samsara, until, in the course of innumerable ages, even the grass and the dust had attained Buddhahood. But from a deeper standpoint it became obvious that the idea of the Bodhisattva is implicit in the logic of Buddhism, that it ows naturally from the principle of not-grasping and from the doctrine of the unreality of the ego. For if nirvana is the state in which the attempt to grasp reality has wholly ceased, through the realization of its impossibility, it will obviously be absurd to think of nirvana itself as something to be grasped or attained.

As is said in the Vajracchedika: All Bodhisattva-heroes should cultivate their minds to think: all sentient beings of whatever class … are caused by me to attain the boundless liberation of nirvana. Yet when vast, innumerable, and immeasurable numbers of beings have thus been liberated, in truth no being has been liberated!

Why is this, Subhuti? It is because no Bodhisattva who is truly a Bodhisattva holds to the idea of an ego, a personality, a being, or a separate individual. Naturally, then, the Bodhisattva makes no motion to depart from the Round of samsara, as if nirvana were somewhere else, for to do so would imply that nirvana is something that needs to be attained and that samsara is an actual reality. In the words of the Lankavatara Sutra: Those who, afraid of the su erings arising from the discrimination of birth-and-death samsara , seek for Nirvana, do not know that birth-and-death and Nirvana are not to be separated from one another; and, seeing that all things subject to discrimination have no reality, they imagine that Nirvana consists in the future annihilation of the senses and their elds.

How can I try to let go when trying is precisely not letting go? I cannot get rid of this desire, since it is one and the same desire as the desire to get rid of it! Stated baldly, the answer is that all grasping, even for nirvana, is futile—for there is nothing to be grasped. The dialectic with which he demolishes every conception of reality is merely a device for breaking the vicious circle of grasping, and the terminus of his philosophy is not the abject despair of nihilism but the natural and uncontrived bliss ananda of liberation.

The Sunyavada takes its name from the term sunya, void, or sunyata, voidness, with which Nagarjuna described the nature of reality, or rather, of the conceptions of reality which the human mind can form. Conceptions here include not only metaphysical views but also ideals, religious beliefs, ultimate hopes and ambitions of every kind—everything which the mind of man seeks and grasps for his physical or spiritual security. Even the idea of sunya is itself to be voided. Nothing in the universe can stand by itself-no thing, no fact, no being, no event—and for this reason it is absurd to single anything out as the ideal to be grasped.

For what is singled out exists only in relation to its own opposite, since what is is de ned by what is not, pleasure is de ned by pain, life is de ned by death, and motion is de ned by stillness. From one point of view, the same relativity exists between nirvana and samsara, bodhi awakening and klesa de lement. That is to say, the search for nirvana implies the existence and the problem of samsara, and the quest for awakening implies that one is in the state of de lement with delusion.

To put it in another way: as soon as nirvana is made an object of desire, it becornes an element of samsara. The real nirvana cannot be desired because it cannot be conceived. Thus the Lankavatara Sutra says: Again, Mahamati, what is meant by non-duality? It means that light and shade, long and short, black and white, are relative terms, Mahamati, and not independent of each other; as Nirvana and Samsara are, all things are not-two.

There is no Nirvana except where is Samsara; there is no Samsara except where is Nirvana; for the condition of existence is not of a mutually exclusive character. Therefore it is said that all things are non- dual as are Nirvana and Samsara. Hence the famous saying: Form is not di erent from emptiness; emptiness is not di erent from form.

Form is precisely emptiness; emptiness is precisely form. The point of this equation is not to assert a metaphysical proposition but to assist the process of awakening. For awakening will not come to pass when one is trying to escape or change the everyday world of form, or to get away from the particular experience in which one nds oneself at this moment.

Every such attempt is a manifestation of grasping. Even the grasping itself is not to be changed by force, for bodhi [awakening] is the ve o enses, and the ve o enses are bodhi. He may be thoroughly deluded, but since even delusion is bodhi there would be no point in trying to change it.

There is often a deceptive resemblance between opposite extremes. Lunatics frequently resemble saints, and the una ected modesty of the sage often lets him seem to be a very ordinary person. Yet there is no easy way of pointing out the di erence, of saying what it is that the ordinary, worldly fellow does or does not do which makes him different from a Bodhisattva, or vice versa. The entire mystery of Zen lies in this problem, and we shall return to it at the proper time. It is for this reason that the insistence of the Mahayana texts on the unattainability of nirvana and bodhi is not something to be accepted theoretically, as a mere philosophical opinion.

Thereupon the thought came to some of the Gods in that assembly: What the fairies talk and murmur, that we understand though mumbled. What Subhuti has just told us, that we do not understand! Subhuti read their thoughts and said: There is nothing to understand, there is nothing to understand.

For nothing in particular has been indicated, nothing in particular has been explained. For no Dharma doctrine at all has been indicated, lit up, or communicated. So there will be no one who can grasp it.

In the whole universe, within and without, there is nothing whereon to lay any hold, and no one to lay any hold on anything. This has been discovered through clear awareness of everything that seemed to o er a solution or to constitute a reliable reality, through the intuitive wisdom called prajna, which sees into the relational character of everything. The very one who pursues, who sees and knows and desires, the inner subject, has his existence only in relation to the ephemeral objects of his pursuit.

He sees that his grasp upon the world is his strangle-hold about his own neck, the hold which is depriving him of the very life he so longs to attain. And there is no way out, no way of letting go, which he can take by e ort, by a decision of the will. There comes a moment when this consciousness of the inescapable trap in which we are at once the trapper and the trapped reaches a breaking point.

Contrivances, ideals, ambitions, and self-propitiations are no longer necessary, since it is now possible to live spontaneously without trying to be spontaneous. Indeed, there is no alternative, since it is now seen that there never was any self to bring the self under its control. Reduced to the bare essentials, such is the inner process which the Sunyavada is trying to set in motion with its philosophy of total negation.

It must therefore be repeated that the negations apply, not to reality itself, but to our ideas of reality. The Mahayana does, however, have another term for reality which is perhaps rather more indicative than sunya, the void. Tathata therefore indicates the world just as it is, unscreened and undivided by the symbols and definitions of thought.

It points to the concrete and actual as distinct from the abstract and conceptual. As the Bodhisattva Manjusri speaks of the Tathagata in the Saptasatika: Suchness tathata neither becomes nor ceases to become; thus do I see the Tathagata. Suchness does not stand at any point or place; thus do I see the Tathagata. Suchness is neither past, future, nor present; thus do I see the Tathagata.

Suchness does not arise from the dual or the non-dual; thus do I see the Tathagata. Suchness is neither impure nor pure; thus do I see the Tathagata. Suchness neither arises nor comes to an end; thus do I see the Tathagata.

It so comes about that in the Mahayana a Buddha is often seen as a personification of reality, forming the basis of those popular cults in which the Buddhas seem to be worshiped as gods. Furthermore, the various Buddhas who are so venerated—Amitabha, Vairocana, Amitayus, Ratnasambhava, etc.

Here, too, lies the basis of the Buddhism of faith, of the Sukhavati or Pure Land school, in which it is held that all e orts to become a Buddha are merely the false pride of the ego. In this Pure Land all the obstacles which stand in the way of becoming a Buddha in this world are removed, so that rebirth in the Pure Land is virtually equivalent to becoming a Buddha. The repetition of the Name is held to be e ective because, in ages past, Amitabha vowed that he would not enter into supreme Buddhahood unless rebirth in the Pure Land were assured for all beings who invoked his name.

Because he subsequently entered the state of Buddhahood, the vow is effectively fulfilled. On the contrary, to seek to become Buddha is to deny that one is already Buddha—and this is the sole basis upon which Buddhahood can be realized! In short, to become a Buddha it is only necessary to have the faith that one is a Buddha already.

At its deepest level karuna means something rather more than compassion for the ignorance of others. Indeed, it makes nonsense of the idea that Buddhism is always a philosophy of world-denial, in which the uniqueness of forms has no importance. For by karuna it is seen that the dissolution of forms into the void is in no way di erent from the particular characteristics of the forms themselves.

The life of things is only conventionally separable from their death; in reality the dying is the living. The attainment of the one does not involve the annihilation of the other. Do not separate yourself from the world and try to order it around. Each one moves by itself, from within. To walk, we do not pick up our feet with our hands. The individual body is therefore a system of shih shih wu ai, and a Buddha realizes that the whole universe is his body, a marvelously interrelated harmony organized from within itself rather than by interference from outside.

Nagarjuna did not discuss the way in which the void appears as form, the Dharmakaya as the Nirmanakaya, feeling, perhaps, that this would be completely unintelligible to those who had not actually realized awakening.

However, there seem to be some di erences between the two points of view. Here, as always, the Mahayana is not so much a theoretical and speculative construction as an account of an inner experience, and a means of awakening the experience in others.

Measure itself, abstraction, is for the West more of the nature of mind, since we tend to think of mind and spirit as more abstract than concrete.

But in Buddhist philosophy citta does not stand over against a conception of solid stu. Such an image is not in the history of Buddhist thought, and thus the problem of how impalpable mind can in uence solid matter has never arisen.

The di culty of making equations and comparisons between Eastern and Western ideas is that the two worlds do not start with the same assumptions and premises. They do not have the same basic categorizations of experience. The Yogacara does not, therefore, discuss the relation of forms of matter to mind; it discusses the relation of forms to mind, and concludes that they are forms of mind.

For if there is nothing which is not mind, the word belongs to no class, and has no limits, no de nition. The nonverbal, concrete world contains no classes and no symbols which signify or mean anything other than themselves. Consequently it contains no duality. For duality arises only when we classify, when we sort our experiences into mental boxes, since a box is no box without an inside and an outside.

Mental boxes are probably formed in our minds long before formal thought and language supply labels to identify them. We have begun to classify as soon as we notice di erences, regularities and irregularities, as soon as we make associations of any kind.

Yet if classes are a product of the mind, of noticing, association, thought, and language, the world considered simply as all classes of objects is a product of the mind. This is, I think, what the Yogacara means by the assertion that the world is mind-only cittamatram lokam. It means that external and internal, before and after, heavy and light, pleasant and painful, moving and still are all ideas, or mental classi cations.

Their relation to the concrete world is the same as that of words. Is it not, then, merely absurd to speak of the mind, the citta, at all if there is no way of saying what it is? It is not an existence, nor is it a non-existence; it is indeed beyond both existence and non-existence.

It is not to be conceived as a sort of ghostly gas permeating all beings, since space and extension are likewise here only in potentiality. For the Mahayana does not make the mistake of trying to account for the production of the world from the mind by a series of necessary causes. Whatever is linked by causal necessity is of the world of maya, not beyond it. Speaking somewhat poetically, the world illusion comes out of the Great Void for no reason, purposelessly, and just because there is no necessity for it to do so.

In fact, the relationship with the shakti was anything but promiscuous, and involved the mature and all-too-infrequent notion of a man and a woman undertaking their spiritual development in common. This included a sancti cation of the sexual relationship which should logically have been part of the Catholic view of marriage as a sacrament. For a full treatment see S. In Conze 2 , pp. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. See Bibliography. Nagel and J.

In Suzuki 2 , p. I have cited the Lankavatara for both Madhyamika and Yogacara viewpoints, since either both schools have used the sutra or else it is a work of the latter incorporating views of the former. Since historical order is here a matter of conjecture, I have simply chosen sources which seem to express the ideas in question most effectively.

Those who know do not speak; Those who speak do not know. In other schools of Buddhism, awakening or bodhi seems remote and almost superhuman, something to be reached only after many lives of patient e ort. But in Zen there is always the feeling that awakening is something quite natural, something startlingly obvious, which may occur at any moment.

If it involves a di culty, it is just that it is much too simple. Zen is also direct in its way of teaching, for it points directly and openly to the truth, and does not trifle with symbolism. Direct pointing chih-chih a is the open demonstration of Zen by nonsymbolic actions or words, which usually appear to the uninitiated as having to do with the most ordinary secular a airs, or to be completely crazy.

But it is certainly consistent with the emphasis of the earlier masters on immediate awakening in the midst of everyday affairs. No one has been able to nd any trace of a speci c Dhyana School in Indian Buddhism, though because of our lack of historical materials this is no evidence that it did not exist. If the characteristic note of Zen is immediate or instantaneous awakening tun wu b without passing through preparatory stages, there are certainly evidences of this principle in India.

It is likened to a mirror immediately re ecting whatever forms and images appear before it. In other words, if nirvana is actually here and now so that to seek it is to lose it, a realization through progressive stages is hardly appropriate. One would have to see into it in the present moment, directly.

Although its origins are probably later than those of Zen in China, there is also a tradition of this kind in Tantric Buddhism, and there is nothing to indicate that there was a reverse in uence from Chinese Zen.

And if it is hidden, one is just measuring darkness. Even today let your master make an end of delusion! This is not the place to discuss the real meaning of immediate awakening and naturalness, but these instances are cited to show that the tradition of a direct path existed outside China, suggesting some original source in Indian Buddhism.

Zen tradition does indeed maintain that immediate awakening is not communicated by the sutras, but has been passed down directly from master to pupil. To this it should hardly be necessary to add that since the tradition is primarily an experience, words can communicate it no more and no less than any other experience.

However, it is not really necessary to suppose that there was ever a speci c Dhyana School in India. The creation of Zen would seem to be su ciently explained by the exposure of Taoists and Confucians to the main principles of Mahayana Buddhism. Therefore the appearance of trends very close to Zen can be seen almost as soon as the great Mahayana sutras became available in China—that is to say, with the work of the great Indian scholar-monk Kumarajiva.

Seng-chao had been converted to Buddhism as a result of reading t h e Vimalakirti Sutra—a text which has exercised considerable in uence upon Zen. The Confucian stress on the importance of family life would not easily sympathize with a rigorously monastic type of Buddhism. Confucian and Taoist alike would be especially agreeable to the idea of an awakening which did not involve the extermination of human passions, as klesa may also be translated.

Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. It appears your browser does not have it turned on.

Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help!

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Beginning at the age of 20, when he wrote The Spirit of Zen, he developed an audience of millions who were enriched by his book, tape recordings, radio, television, and public lectures.

Just before his death he completed the projec He has narrated many of his books including this one and it is by far a more enjoyable experience. This is one of the best things to gift a young idealist and I cannot rate it highly enough. Dont sweat the small stuff, live in the present, minimise consumerism, and make pace with your emotions good as well as bad. Watts is such an engaging writer.

Overall there was a balance of both of these things. Those essays that dealt with mental and physical health were of particular interest to me, as were those that asked the question over and over again ' Reading this book is like going to my coach with big problems about running, academics, or some girl I was dating and walking out feeling as if the problems never existed at all.

It allows the reader to entertain oneself by questioning everything. I'm now in an Alan Watts phase. A lovely collection of ideas from an easy-to-read philosopher, who reminds us that it is always now, and that the self is an illusion.