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ZEN BUDDHISM There's enthusiasm for you, for Stevenson had found and lived his Zen. Perhaps you now smile condescendingly, assuming that Zen is for the child at play. So it is, for the child at play, though it has less knowledge, has far more wisdom than its parents, but the power of a child is greater than the oldest adult can control. “Ummon raises his staff. That is all; but it has the power and force of the Niagara Falls, carrying all before it." Joshu says, “Wash your bowls," and these words have more significance than the periods of Burke and Demosthenes.” Zen is child-like in the sense that of such are the Kingdom of Heaven, but it is a reveille and not a lullaby, a challenge to the whole of man to become what he is.
Zen is neither here nor there, neither now nor then, yet it is in a special sense extremely and entirely here, and now, and this. It is in all senses im-mediate, without intervention between the fact and its experience. Dwight Goddard puts it well. “Zen has no special forms, nor ritual, nor creeds, unless you call 'Seeing into one's own nature' a creed. They sedulously avoid any slavish adoration of images, any authority, any priestcraft. But one thing they do believe in and place an exclusive emphasis upon, namely, right concentration of mind. And this, not only in the technical practice of 'Za-Zen', but in their attitude towards everything else, their labour, their begging, their eating, their social contacts. They maintain, throughout the day, an attitude and spirit of
this one thing I do'.". This absolute acceptance of and concentration on the task in hand is part of the method of Zen, whereby the tension in the mind between mediate
1 BLYTH, P. 108. 2 Zen as a World Religion, Buddhism in England, V., P. 114.
