Zen Buddhism

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: William Heinemann LTD

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PREFACE
ZEN is the essence and value of life, that which makes life worth living. Being that which uses and discards all forms, whether of thought, words or material substance, it cannot be described in terms of form. As Taoism, the godmother of Zen, declared of Tao, "The Tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao."
Yet “to get it across" (a most thought-provoking phrase) some form is necessary, and in a book which is not merely about Zen, but which attempts to transfer the life of Zen to the receptive reader, a style must be devised to the occasion. To this end I have fashioned a mixture of the flippant and the deadly serious, the rational and the irrational, or, as Zen would put it, super-rational. It leads the reader's mind to the precipice which lies between the highest thought and the humblest truth and then, by a jerk or joke, tries to push it over. It tries to unite the far and near, the pseudo-holy ideal and the no less holy umbrella-stand. As Ruysbroeck said, “You are as holy as you will be," and in Zen all things are as holy as you make them, being in themselves neither divine nor blushproducing, but precisely what they are. When all is Mind, says Zen, why divide into the compartments of space and time the all-here and the only now? The style of this book, then, is deliberate. If it holds the reader to the task in hand it is good: if not, it is not so good, for the reader.
I do not apologise for being occasionally personal, in
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