An Introduction to Zen Buddhism

by D.T. Suzuki

Our attempts—with a few exceptions—have all stopped short at either magic (mystery cults, among which Christianity must be counted)

To meditate, a man has to fix his thought on something; for instance, on the oneness of God, or his infinite love, or on the impermanence of things. But this is the very thing Zen desires to avoid. If there is anything Zen strongly emphasizes it is the attainment of freedom; that is, freedom from all unnatural encumbrances. Meditation is something artificially put on; it does not belong to the native activity of the mind. Upon what do the fowl of the air meditate? Upon what do the fish in the water meditate? They fly; they swim. Is not that enough? Who wants to fix his mind on the unity of God and man, or on the nothingness of this life? Who wants to be arrested in the daily manifestations of his life-activity by such meditations as the goodness of a divine being or the everlasting fire of hell? We may say that Christianity is monotheistic, and the Vedanta pantheistic; but we cannot make a similar assertion about Zen. Zen is neither monotheistic nor pantheistic; Zen defies all such designations. Hence there is no object in Zen upon which to fix the thought. Zen is a wafting cloud in the sky. No screw fastens it, no string holds it; it moves as it lists. No amount of meditation will keep Zen in one place. Meditation is not Zen. Neither pantheism nor monotheism provides Zen with its subjects of concentration. If Zen is monotheistic, it may tell its followers to meditate on the oneness of things where all differences and inequalities, enveloped in the all-illuminating brightn...

One critic1 regards Zen as “the Buddhist counterpart of the ‘Spiritual Exercises’ of St. Ignatius Loyala”. The critic shows a great inclination to find Christian analogies for things Buddhistic, and this is one of such instances. Those who have at all a clear understanding of Zen will at once see how wide of the mark this comparison is. Even superficially speaking, there is not a shadow of similitude between the exercises of Zen and those proposed by the founder of the Society of Jesus.

Christians as well as Buddhists can practise Zen just as big fish and small fish are both contentedly living in the same ocean. Zen is the ocean, Zen is the air, Zen is the mountain, Zen is thunder and lightning, the spring flower, summer heat, and winter snow; nay, more than that, Zen is the man.

The attitude of Zen towards the formal worship of God may be gleaned more clearly from Joshu’s (Chao-chou, 778-897) remarks given to a monk who was bowing reverently before Buddha. When Joshu slapped the monk, the latter said, “Is it not a laudable thing to pay respect to Buddha?” “Yes,” answered the master, “but it is better to go without even a laudable thing.” Does this attitude savour of anything nihilistic and iconoclastic? Superficially, yes; but let us dive deep into the spirit of Joshu out of the depths of which this utterance comes, and we will find ourselves confronting an absolute affirmation quite beyond the ken of our discursive understanding.

It goes without saying that this stick thus brought forward can be any one of myriads of things existing in this world of particulars. In this stick we find all possible existences and also all our possible experiences concentrated. When we know it— this homely piece of bamboo—we know the whole story in a most thoroughgoing manner. Holding it in my hand, I hold the whole universe. Whatever statement I make about it is also made of everything else. When one point is gained, all other points go with it. As the Avatamsaka (Kegon) philosophy teaches: “The One embraces All, and All is merged in the One. The One is All, and All is the One. The One pervades All, and All is in the One. This is so with every object, with every existence.” But, mind you, here is no pantheism, nor the theory of identity. For when the stick of bamboo is held out before you it is just the stick, there is no universe epitomized in it, no All, no One; even when it is stated that “I see the stick” or that “Here is a stick,” we all miss the mark. Zen is no more there, much less the philosophy of the Avatamsaka.

Yet there are philosophers who, taking some of the above utterances in their literary and logical sense, try to see something of pantheism in them. For instance, when the master says, “Three pounds of flax,” or “A dirt-scraper,” by this is apparently meant, they would insist, to convey a pantheistic idea. That is to say that those Zen masters consider the Buddha to be manifesting himself in everything: in the flax, in a piece of wood, in the running stream, in the towering mountains, or in works of art. Mahayana Buddhism, especially Zen, seems to indicate something of the spirit of pantheism, but nothing is in fact farther from Zen than this representation.

Satori is not seeing God as he is, as might be contended by some Christian mystics.

Whereas with the God of mysticism there is the grasping of a definite object; when you have God, what is no-God is excluded. This is self-limiting. Zen

wants absolute freedom, even from God.

At present there are no Buddhist monasteries in China which do not belong to the Zen sect, and most of them are of the Rinzai school of Zen.5 One reason among others for this conquest is to be found in the practice of zazen as the means of mastering the koan and thus attaining satori.

Here then is one of the first koans given to latter-day students. When the Sixth Patriarch was asked by the monk Myo (Ming) what Zen was, he said: “When your mind is not dwelling on the dualism of good and evil, what is your original face before you were born?” (Show me this “face” and you get into the mystery of Zen. Who are you before Abraham was born? When you have had a personal, intimate interview with this personage, you will better know who you are and who God is. The monk is here told to shake hands with this original man, or, if metaphysically put, with his own inner self.)

When we come out of satori we see the familiar world with all its multitudinous objects and ideas together with their logicalness, and pronounce them “good”.

He left a famous saying which had been the guiding principle of his life, “A day of no work is a day of no eating,” which is to say, “No eating without working.”

Psychologically considered, this is splendid; for muscular activity is the best remedy for the dullness of mind which may grow out of the meditative habit, and Zen is very apt to produce this undesirable effect. The trouble with most religious recluses is that their mind and body do not act in unison; their body is always separated from their mind, and the latter from the former; they imagine that there is the body and there is the mind and forget that this separation is merely ideational, and therefore artificial.

The body kept busy will also keep the mind busy, and therefore fresh, wholesome, and alert.

Conviction must be gained through experience and not through abstraction. Moral assertion ought everywhere to be over and above intellectual judgment; that is, truth ought to be based upon one’s living experience.

The desire to possess is considered by Buddhism to be one of the worst passions with which mortals are apt to be obsessed. What, in fact, causes so much misery in the world is the universal impulse of acquisition. As power is desired, the strong always tyrannize over the weak; as wealth is coveted, the rich and poor are always crossing swords of bitter enmity. International wars rage, social unrest ever increases, unless this impulse to get and to hold is completely uprooted. Cannot society be reorganized upon an entirely different basis from what we have been used to see from the beginning of history? Cannot we ever hope to stop the massing of wealth and the accumulation of power merely from the desire for individual or national aggrandizement? Despairing of the utter irrationality of human affairs, Buddhist monks have gone to the other extreme and cut themselves off even from reasonable and perfectly innocent enjoyments of life. However, the Zen ideal of putting a monk’s belongings into a tiny box is his mute protest, though so far ineffective, against the present order of society.

In truth, the intellect, the imagination, and all the other mental faculties as well as the physical objects that surround us, our own bodies not being excepted, are given for the unfolding and enhancing of the highest powers possessed by us, and not merely for the gratification of individual whims and desires, which are sure to conflict with and injure the interests and rights to be asserted by others. These are some of the inner ideas underlying the simplicity and poverty of the monk’s life.

They receive no formal or literary education, which is gained mostly from books and abstract instructions; but what they do gain is practical and efficient, for the basic principle of the Zendo life is “learning by doing”. They disdain soft education and look upon it as a predigested food meant for convalescents.

When Tanka (Tan-hsia) of the T‘ang dynasty stopped at Yerinji in the Capital, it was severely cold; so taking down one of the Buddha images enshrined there, he made a fire of it and warmed himself. The keeper of the shrine, seeing this, was greatly incensed, and exclaimed: “How dare you burn my wooden image of the Buddha?” Tanka began to search in the ashes as if he were looking for something, and said: “I am gathering the holy saurias3 from the burnt ashes.” “How,” said the keeper, “can you get sariras from a wooden Buddha?” Tanka retorted, “If there are no sariras to be found in it, may I have the remaining two Buddhas for my fire?” The shrine-keeper later lost both his eyebrows for remonstrating against this apparent impiety of Tanka, while the Buddha’s wrath never fell on the latter.

The history of Zen gives many such examples of great masters who emerged into the world after a period of retirement. The idea is not the practice of asceticism, but is the “maturing”, as has been properly designated, of one’s moral character. Many serpents and adders are waiting at the porch, and if one fails to trample them down effectively they raise their heads again, and the whole edifice of moral culture built up in vision may collapse even in a day.

Jesus said, “When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth; that thine alms may be in secret.” This is the “secret virtue” of Buddhism. But when the account goes on to say that “Thy Father who seeth in secret shall recompense thee”, we see a deep cleavage between Buddhism and Christianity. As long as there is any thought of anybody, be he God or devil, knowing of our doings and making recompense, Zen would say, “You are not yet one of us.”

In Christianity we seem to be too conscious of God, though we say that in him we live and move and have our being. Zen wants to have this last trace of God-consciousness, if possible, obliterated.

Taking it all in all, Zen is emphatically a matter of personal experience; if anything can be called radically empirical, it is Zen. No amount of reading, no amount of teaching, no amount of contemplation will ever make one a Zen master. Life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow; to stop it for examination and analysis is to kill it, leaving its cold corpse to be embraced.