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ZEN BUDDHISM mastery of the seeking mind, and mind-control and development are common ground in all the great religions. Asked, "How shall I escape from the wheel of birth and death?” a Master replied, “Who puts you under restraint?” For, as Sir Edwin Arnold wrote in The Light of Asia, "Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels, None other holds you, that ye live and die, And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss
Its spokes of agony. ..." In the terse phraseology of the Dhammapada, “As a fletcher straightens his arrow, so the wise man straightens his unsteady mind, which is so hard to control." Or again, more pithily still, "Irrigators guide water; fletchers straighten arrows; carpenters bend wood; wise men shape themselves."1 From the earliest days of Indian Yoga, from the Stoics to the present day Theosophists, all who seek enlightenment have agreed on the need of mindcontrol and subsequent mind-development. "Yoga," says Patanjali, is "the hindering of the modifications of the thinking principle”, and until this "thinking principle" has been brought under control the mind cannot see its object clearly, much less see, as sooner or later it must learn to see, itself. The student of Zen, therefore, learns, like other aspirants for enlightenment, to control his thinking mind, for until he has developed his intellect he cannot rise beyond it. The purpose of all such exercises is, from the first, to "see into one's own nature”, and no external force or agency is admitted to exist. “Zen is neither monotheistic nor pantheistic; Zen defies all such
1 Dhammapada, Verses 33 and 145.
