Zen Buddhism

SR No.: 011121
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: William Heinemann LTD
Total Pages: 278
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 15 MB

Page 38

BEYOND THE INTELLECT 17 know this to be so, “to escape from the prison of rationality" as Dr. Suzuki calls the intellect, this is the way of Zen.
There is, however, a method of taking the problem in flank, as it were. It will be non-sense to the rationalminded, but such will read no further. Those who read on will expect increasing non-sense, for sense, the suburban villas of rational thought, will soon be left behind, and the mind will be free on the illimitable hills of its own inherent joy. Here, then, is the real solution to the problem of the opposites. Shall I tell it you? Consider a live goose in a bottle. How to get it out without hurting the goose or breaking the bottle? The answer is simple “There, it's out!"1
Perhaps the point is already made by now that Zen is a matter of intuitive experience, and not intellectual understanding. But the fact is so fundamental to the Western thought-bound mind that I may be forgiven if I hammer it in.
Let us look at the position from the viewpoint of arrival, on the assumption, that is, that the goose is already out of the bottle. This interfused Oneness-Twoness is, and “the Essence of Mind is intrinsically pure”. Bearing these two propositions in mind, whence comes the illusion of a separate duality? The answer is manas, that faculty of the lower mind which analyses, separates, divides, and thereby, in the illusion that its analysis is final, produces that ignorance which is the cause of suffering, including the root illusion of the reality of self. For self exists and yet is the not-self. It is the Self of which it is part and itself, and both, and neither. But it behaves as if it existed apart from the rest of itself. Hinc illae lacrimae, those tears 1 This is the subject of the book's Wrapper and End-papers.