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I12
ZEN BUDDHISM many of us carry about, of pretty girls, and vain regrets and memories. The girl was a girl and in need of a lift. She had it and the monk walked on.
The Zen way of doing things is to do them. Just like that. I stood at the foot of a high dive, waiting for the courage to climb the steps and dive. I measured the height from the water, worked out how to place my hands and how to fall, considered the temperature of the water, the people in the way and the chances of breaking my neck. All this took time, but I still remained where I was. I had not dived. Finally, I tried the Zen way of diving. I just walked up, took a breath and dived. The same applies to getting up in the morning, writing that letter, or doing those exercises. Just do them, before the vast array of emotions can intervene. Now is the best time for everything, because if done now it is im-mediately done, without like or dislike, purpose or desire. For things are what we do with them; they are not good or evil save as we make them so, and the same applies to their being useful, beautiful or just plain dull. Zen lies in how we do things rather than in what we do, and the enlightened man will walk and talk and smoke and laugh quite differently from the man who still thinks politics "matter" and that things are what they seem. The Zen practitioner is in the world and yet not of it; his habitual consciousness is above the opposites, above the discrimination by which we choose just one of a pair of opposites and draw aside our robes from contamination with the other.
Are we becoming philosophical? Let us go straight up the hill. Let us eschew irrelevance and the byways of delightful thought, and go for it. That is where Alice (Through the Looking-Glass) describes the Path more
