Key learning points from the book
‘The way of zen’
By Alan Watts
INADEQUACY OF LINEAR METHODS
My conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real ‘me’ than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems to be so fleeting and intangible but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions about what I will be in the future. So it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is.
It is important to recognize that the memories and the past events which make up a man’s historical identity are no more than a selection. From the actual infinitude of events and experiences, some have been picked out – abstracted – as significant, and this significance has of course been determined by conventional standards.
Communication by conventional signs of this type gives us an abstract, one-at-a-time translation of the universe in which things are happening altogether-at-once – a universe whose concrete reality always escapes perfect description in these abstract terms. The perfect description of a small particle of dust by these means would take everlasting time, since one would have to account for every point in its volume.
We call our bodies complex as a result of trying to understand them in terms of linear thought, of words and concepts. But the complexity is not so much in our bodies as in the task of trying to understand them by this means of thinking. It is as complicated as trying to drink water with a fork instead of a cup.
The general tendency of the Western mind is to feel that we do not really understand what we cannot represent, what we cannot communicate, by linear signs, by thinking. Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear form of representational thinking.To be free 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.
We can all admit that we ‘know’ how to move our hands, how to make a decision, or how to breathe, even though we can hardly begin to explain how we do it in words. We know how to do it because we just do it. Taoism is an extension of this kind of knowledge, an extension which gives us a very different view of ourselves from that to which we are conventionally accustomed, and a view which liberates the human mind from its constricting identification with the abstract ego.
THE VALIDITY OF I CHING
We feel that we decide rationally because we base our decisions on collecting relevant data about the matter in hand. We do not depend upon such irrelevant trifles as the chance tossing of a coin, or the patterns of tea leaves or the cracks in a shell.
Yet an exponent of I ching might ask whether we really know what information is relevant, since our plans are constantly upset by unforeseen incidents. He might ask how do we know whether we have collected enough information to decide. If we were rigorously ‘scientific’ in collecting the formation for our decisions, it would take us so long to collect the data that the time for action would have passed long before the work had been completed.
How do we know when we have enough ? Does the information itself tell us that it is enough ? On the contrary, we go through the motions of gathering the necessary information in a rational way, and then, just because of a hunch, or because we are tired of thinking, or because the time has come to decide, we act. He would ask whether this is not depending just as much upon ‘irrelevant trifles’ as if we had been casting the yarrow stalks.
By far, the greater part of our important decisions depend upon ‘hunch’ – in other words, upon the peripheral vision of our mind. Thus the reliability of our decisions depends upon our ability to ‘feel’ the situation, upon the degree to which the peripheral vision has been developed.
MAKING VS GROWING
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’. For things which are made are separate parts together, like machines, or things fashioned from without inwards, like sculptures.
Whereas things grown divide themselves into parts, from within outwards. Because the natural universe works mainly according to the principles of growth, it would seem quite odd to the Chinese mind as t how could it be made.
If the universe were made, there could of course be someone who knows how it is made – who could explain how it is put together bit by bit as a technician can explain in one-at-a-time words how to assemble a machine.
It may be of significance that the word BRAHMAN is from the root Brih – ‘to grow’, since his creative activity, like that of the Tao, is with the spontaneity proper to growth as distinct from the deliberation proper to making.
SOME ASPECTS OF TAO
When we need to see the details of a distant object, the eyes must be relaxed not staring or trying to see. So, no amount of working with the muscles of the mouth and tongue will enable us to taste our food more acutely. The eyes and the tongue must be trusted to do the work by themselves.
It would be impossible to believe oneself to be innately evil without discrediting the very belief for all notions of a perverted mind would be perverted notions.
It is a state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club. If the ordinary man is the one who has to walk by lifting his legs with his hands, the Taoist is one who has learnt to let the legs walk by themselves.
Superior work is not planned, it has the quality of an accident. It lies at a much deeper and more genuine level, for 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.
ABOUT BUDDHISM & HINDUISM
It was a basic Confucian principle that : ‘It is man who makes the truth great and not truth that makes the man great.’ For this reason, humaneness or human-heartedness was always felt to be superior to ‘righteousness’, since man himself is greater than any idea he may invent.
Thus the basic myth of Hinduism is that the world is God playing hide-and-seek with himself. Every life is a part or role in which the mind of God is absorbed, somewhat as an actor absorbs himself in being Hamlet and forgets that in real life, he is Mr.Smith. By the act of self-abandonment, God becomes all beings, yet at the same time does not cease to be God.
The Atman is to the consciousness what the head is to the sense of sight – neither light nor darkness, neither full nor empty, only an inconceivable beyond.
THE ABSURDITY OF CHOOSING
There is a universal illusion that what is pleasant and good can be wrested away from what is painful or evil. To see this is to see that good without evil is like up without down.
The fondest illusion of the human mind is that in the course of time, everything may be made better and better. It is a general opinion that were this not possible, the life of man would lack all meaning and incentive.
Zen’s apparently dismal starting point is to understand the absurdity of choosing, of the whole feeling that life may be significantly improved by a constant selection of the ‘good’ In life, to succeed is always to ‘fail’ because the greater one succeeds, the greater is the need to go on succeeding. To eat is to survive to be hungry.
The illusion of significant improvement arises in moments of contrast as when one turns from the left to the right on a hard bed. The position is ‘better’ so long as the contrast remains but before long the second position begins to feel like the first and the first like the second.
The sensation of comfort can be maintained only in relation to the sensation of discomfort, just as an image is visible to the eye only by reason of a contrasting back-ground.
Zen does not however take the attitude that it is so futile to eat when hungry that one may as well starve, nor is it so inhuman as to say that when we itch we should not scratch.
ZEN & FATALISM
However, to a dualistic mode of thought, it will seem that the standpoint of Zen is that of fatalism instead of free choice. But it isn’t so. Because fatalism implies submission to inevitabilities. Submission to fate implies someone who submits, someone who is the helpless puppet of circumstances, and for Zen there is no such person.
The duality of subject and object, of the knower and the known, is seen to be just as relative, as mutual, as inseparable as every other. We do not sweat because it is hot, sweating is the heat.This viewpoint is unfamiliar because it is our settled convention to think that heat comes first and then, by causality the body sweats.
Look at the phenomenon of the moon-in-the-water. Likening to human experience, say water is the subject and moon is the object. When there is no water, there is no moon-in-the-water nor is there moon-in-the-water, when there is no moon. This shows inseparability of the subject and object.
Another way to notice the inseparability is that when the moon rises, the water does not wait to receive its image and when even the tiniest drop of water is poured out, the moon does not wait to cast its reflection. The moon does not intend to cast its reflection, nor does receive its image on purpose. This is simply because the apparent ‘two’ are not separate.
Hence, human experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals. Men feel themselves to be victims or puppets of their experience because they separate ‘themselves’ from their minds, thinking that the nature of the mind-body has been involuntarily thrust upon ‘them’.
But Zen asks as to ‘who’ it is that ‘has’ the mind and ‘who’ it was that did not ask to be born because father and mother conceived us. Thence it appears that the entire sense of subjective isolation, of being the ‘one’ who was ‘given’ a mind and to whom experience happens, is an illusion of bad semantics – the hypnotic suggestion of repeated wrong thinking. For there is no ‘myself’ apart from the mind-body which gives structure to my experience.
It is likewise ridiculous to talk of the mind-body as something which was ‘given’ this structure. It is that structure and before the structure arose, there was no mind-body.
THE SCIENCE BEHIND SUBJECTIVE ISOLATION
Our problem is that the power of thought enables us to form symbols of things apart from things themselves. We make an idea of ourselves apart from ourselves. Because the idea is so much more comprehensible than the reality, the symbol is so much more stable than the fact, we learn to identify ourselves with out idea of ourselves. Hence the subjective feeling of a ‘self’ which ‘has’ a mind, of an inwardly isolated subject to whom experiences involuntarily happen.
Zen points out that our precious ‘self’ is just an idea, useful and legitimate enough if seen for what it is, but disastrous if identified with our real nature. The un-natural awkwardness of a certain type of self-consciousness comes into being when we are aware of the conflict or contrast between the idea of ourselves, on the one hand, and the immediate, concrete feeling of ourselves, on the other.
When we are no longer identified with our idea of ourselves, the entire relationship between the subject and object, the knower and the known, undergoes a sudden and a revolutionary change. It becomes a real relationship, a mutuality in which the subject creates the object just as much as the object creates the subject. The knower no longer feels himself to be independent of the known; the experiencer no longer feels himself to stand apart from the experience.
Consequently, the whole notion of getting ‘something’ out of life, of ‘seeking’ something from experience, becomes absurd. To put it in another way, it becomes vividly clear that in concrete fact I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.
The sense of subjective isolation is also based on a failure to see the relativity of voluntary and involuntary events. We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision, and involuntary when they happen without a decision. But if decision itself were voluntary, every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide-an infinite regression which fortunately doesn’t happen.
Oddly enough, if we were to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide. We are free to decide because decision ‘happens’. We just decide without the faintest understanding of how we do it. In fact, it is neither voluntary nor involuntary.
To ‘get the feel’ of this relativity is to find another extraordinary transformation of our experience as a whole, which may be described in either of two ways. I feel that I am deciding everything that happens, or I feel, that everything including my decisions, is just happening spontaneously. For a decision – the freest of my actions- just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.
Man’s identification with his idea of himself gives him a specious and precarious sense of permanence. For this idea is relatively fixed, being based upon carefully selected memories of his past, memories which have a preserved and fixed character. But to the degree that he identifies himself with a fixed idea, he becomes aware of ‘life’ as something which flows past him – faster and faster as he grows older, as his idea becomes more rigid, more bolstered with memories. The more he attempts to clutch the world, the more he feels as a process in motion.
ZEN : NOTHING TO DO, NOWHERE TO GO
Zen is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is, that there will be no point in going. The life of Zen begins therefore in a dis-illusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist – the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.
For all these things are a deception of symbols pretending to be realities, and to seek after them is like walking straight into a wall upon which some painter has by the convention of perspective, suggested an open passage.
In short, Zen begins at a point when there is nothing further to seek, nothing to be gained. Zen is most emphatically not to be regarded as a system of self-improvement, or a way of ‘becoming’ a Buddha. For all ideas of self-improvement and of becoming or getting something in the future relate solely to our abstract image of ourselves. To follow them is to give ever more reality to that image.
When we go looking out for the self, we cannot find any self apart from the mind, and we cannot find any mind apart from those very experiences which the mind – now vanished – was trying to grasp. In R.H.Blyth’s arresting metaphor, when we were just about to swat the fly, the fly flew up and sat on the swatter.
On the other hand, our true non-conceptual self is already the Buddha, and needs no improvement. In the course of time, it may grow, but one does not blame an egg for not being a chicken; still less does one blame a pig for having a shorter neck than a giraffe.
FROM ABSTRACT TO CONCRETE
The difficulty of Zen is of course, to shift one’s attention from the abstract to the concrete, from the symbolic self to one’s true nature. So long as we merely talk about it, so long as we turn over ideas in our minds about ‘symbol’ and ‘reality’ or keep repeating ‘ I am not my idea of myself’, this is still mere abstraction.
Zen created the method (Upaya) of ‘direct pointing’ in order to escape from this vicious circle, in order to thrust the real immediately to our notice. When reading a difficult book, it is of no help to think ‘ I should concentrate’, for one thinks about concentration instead of what the book has to say. Likewise in studying or practicing Zen, it is of nouse to think about Zen. To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to ‘stink of Zen’.
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS : THE BASIC SIN
A man rings like a cracked bell when he thinks and acts with a split mind – one part standing aside to interfere with the other, to control, to condemn or to admire. The illusion of this split comes from the mind’s attempt to be both itself and its idea of itself, from a fatal confusion of fact with symbol.
To make an end of the illusion, the mind must stop trying to act upon itself, upon its stream of experiences, from the standpoint of the idea of itself which we call the ego.
The essential quality of naturalness is the sincerity of the undivided mind which does not dither between alternatives.
Human self-consciousness is very much like the feedback technology of a servo-system, like the thermostat measuring the ambient temperature for a furnace which heats a room.The proper adjustment of a feedback system is always a complex mechanical problem, for the feedback system itself needs to be adjusted for its own accuracy with another feedback system and this in turn, requires one more and so on.
So for a highly accurate, though not fully accurate result, the system requires too many feedback systems and it gets frustrated by its own complexity. The signal may take too long to reach the source of action to be of any use. Similarly, when human beings think too carefully and minutely about an action to be taken, they cannot make up their minds in time to act.
In other words, one cannot correct one’s means of self-correction indefinitely. There must soon be a source of information at the end of the line which is the final authority. Failure to trust its authority (the memory) will make it impossible to act, and the system will be paralyzed. One cant keep trying to remember whether one has remembered accurately or not.
THE NEED FOR ERROR
Every system needs a margin of ‘lag’ or error. If we try to make a thermostat absolutely accurate – that is if we bring upper and lower degrees of thermostat regulation to a constant 70 degrees in order to have an accurate temperature, then again the system will try to shut off and on and off and on and be jarred and shake itself to pieces.
This system is too sensitive and shows signs similar to human anxiety for when a human being is so self-conscious, so self-controlled that he cannot let go of himself (his memories & re-considerations in order to reach a decision); then he dithers or wobbles between opposites.
The effort to remain always ‘good’ or ‘happy’ is like trying to hold the thermostat to a constant 70 degrees by making the lower limit the same as upper.
Also, in order to keep up the supply of information in the memory, the mind-body must continue to act ‘on its own’. It must not cling too closely to its own record. There must be a ‘lag’ or a distance between the source of information and the source of action. When the desire for certainty and security prompts identification between the mind and its own image of itself, it cannot let go of itself. It feels that it should not do what it is doing and that it should do what it is not doing.
LEAPING INTO ACTION
Actually, the mind cannot act without giving up the impossible attempt to control itself beyond a certain point. It must let go of itself both in the sense of trusting its own memory and reflection, and in the sense of acting spontaneously, on its own into the unknown.
Wu Hsin is action on any level, physical or mental, without trying at the same moment to observe and check the action from outside.
Whether trusting our memories or trusting the mind to act on its own, it comes to the same thing (because we don’t go ahead and check if the said ‘memory’ itself is a valid record or conclusion & so on): ultimately we must act and think, live and die, from a source beyond all ‘our’ knowledge and control. But this source is ourselves, and when, we see that, it no longer stands over against us as a threatening object.
No amount of care and hesitancy, no amount of introspection and searching of our motives, can make any ultimate difference to the fact that the mind is : Like an eye that sees but cannot see itself.
In the end, the only alternative to a shuddering paralysis is to leap into action regardless of the consequences. Action in this spirit may be right or wrong with respect to conventional standards. But our decisions upon the conventional level must be supported by the conviction that whatever we do, and whatever ‘happens’ to us, is ultimately ‘right’. In other words, we must enter into it without ‘second thought’ of regret, hesitancy, doubt or self-recrimination.
HANDLING SECOND THOUGHTS
The way to handle second thoughts is not by brushing them off for how can blood ever wash off blood ? Thoughts can never brush off thoughts. The simpler way out is to see the fact that there is nothing inherently like a second thought. It is simply a mental construction which we should not try to hold or reject. In this light, all such thoughts vanish without trace.
Social conditioning fosters the identification of the mind with a fixed idea of itself as the means of self-control, and as a result the man thinks of himself as ‘I’ – the ego. Thereupon the mental centre of gravity shifts from the original or spontaneous mind to the ego image. Inspite of knowing this, I cannot be intentionally unintentional or purposely spontaneous.
It is at this point that Zen comes and asks ‘ Do you have an intention to be intentional or a purpose to be purposive ?’ Suddenly I realize that my very intending is spontaneous or that my controlling self – the ego- arises from my uncontrolled or natural self. I SEE THAT IT IS ACTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO BE SPONTANEOUS. For what I cannot help doing, I am doing spontaneously but if I am at the same time trying to control it, I interpret it as a compulsion.
As soon as I understand that my voluntary and purposeful action happens spontaneously ‘ by itself’, just like breathing, hearing and feeling, I am no longer caught in the contradiction of trying to be spontaneous. There is no real contradiction since ‘trying’ here is spontaneity.
Seeing this the compulsive, blocked, tied-up feeling vanishes. It is just as if I had been absorbed into a tug-of-war between my two hands, and had forgotten that both were mine. No block to spontaneity remains when the trying is seen to be needless.
NO DEVICES, NO KARMA
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. Zen stresses that one does not realize the spontaneous life by depending on the repetitions 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 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.
The Zen experience is more of a conclusion than a premise. For we are here at a limit where words break down because they always imply a meaning which is beyond themselves- and here there is no meaning beyond. Although profoundly ‘inconsequential’, the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied, it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
The characteristic notes of a spontaneous life are :
a) going ahead without hesitation (mo chih chu)
b) purposelessness (wu wei)
c) lack of affectation or simplicity (wu shih)
ABOVE ALL, DON’T WOBBLE
While the Zen experience does not imply any specific course of action, since it has no purpose, no motivation, it turns unhesitatingly to anything that presents itself to be done. Mo chih chu is the mind functioning without blocks, without ‘wobbling’ between alternatives., and much of Zen training consists in confronting the student with dilemmas which he is expected to handle without stopping to deliberate and ‘choose’.
The response to the situation muct follow with the immediacy of sound issuing from the hands when they are clapped, or sparks from a flint when struck. The student accustomed to this type of response may at first be confused, but as he gains faith in his original or spontaneous mind, he will not only respond with ease, but the responses themselves will acquire a starling appropriateness. This is something like the professional comedian’s gift of unprepared wit which is equal to any situation.
The original or unborn mind is constantly working miracles even in the most ordinary person. Even though a tree has innumerable leaves, the mind takes them in all at once without being ‘stopped’ by any one of them.
Our natural organism performs the most marvelously complex activities without the least hesitation or deliberation. Conscious thought is itself founded upon its own system of spontaneous functioning, for which there is really no alternative to trusting oneself completely to its working. Oneself is its working.
BLOCKING & UNBLOCKING
Zen is not merely a cult of impulsive action. The point of Mo chih chu is not to eliminate reflective thought but to eliminate ‘blocking’ in both action and thought, so that the response of the mind is always like a ‘ball in a mountain stream’ – ‘one thought after another without hesitation’.
Because being blocked is always so annoying and disconcerting, one tends also to block at blocking, so that the state turns into the kind of wobbling dither characteristic of the snarled feedback system. The simplest cure is to feel free to block, so that one does not block at blocking. When one feels free to block, the blocking automatically eliminates itself.
Blocking is perhaps the best translation of the Zen term ‘Nien’ as it occurs in the phrase wu nien which means ‘no thought’ or better still ‘no second thought’. Takuan points out that this is the real meaning of the word ‘attachment’ in Buddhism as when it is said that a Buddha is free from worldly attachments. It does not mean that he is a stone Buddha with no feelings, no emotions and no sensations of hunger or pain.
It only means that he does not block at anything.Thus it is typical of Zen that its style of action has the strongest feeling of ‘commitment’, of ‘follow-through’. It enters into everything whole-heartedly and freely without having to keep an eye on itself.
Quality of wu shih is about naturalness without any contrivances or means for being natural such as thoughts of Zen, Tao or Buddha. One does not exclude such thoughts, they simply fall away when seen to be unnecessary.
As the fish swims in the water but is unmindful of the water, the bird flies in the wind but knows not of the wind, a man of Zen does not notice itself. And this is the reason why no one notices him.
In Zen there is neither self nor Buddha to which one can cling, no good to gain and no evil to be avoided, no thoughts to be eradicated and no mind to be purified, no body to perish and no soul to be saved. At one blow, this entire framework of abstractions is shattered to fragments.
