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ZEN TECHNIQUE
141 grow in perfect unison with this attainment. To do this a further period of training is necessary. His intellectual attainments must be further put to trial by coming in actual contact with the world."1 There are no rules for this maturing. The individual may retire to the mountains or live in the market place, but in the end he is so soaked in Zen, as it were, that all his reactions will come from a point beyond the intellect. Thereafter he may return to the monastic life and be accepted as a Roshi, prepared to face the tremendous strain of a hundred minds or more attacking his own at all hours of the waking day with a view to arriving at the same thought-cleansed enlightenment.
As is fully set out in a number of Dr. Suzuki's works, the life of the Zen monk differs from that of his western equivalent in that there are no "holy offices", nor any time when the mind is at rest from the task of selfenlightenment. There is neither work nor play. All is subordinate to the task in hand, the attainment of satori. But though the koan is held in the mind by night and day, and the Master is available wherever he may be, there is the formal life of the Zen-Do, the Meditation Hall, with long hours of "meditation", in the sense of full concentration on the koan in hand. At these times the Master is always available in his room for san-zen, a somewhat terrifying interview. For as soon as the formal bows are made, all ceremony is cast aside. The monk attacks the Master's mind and the Master "replies" with the same tremendous concentration of energy, "What do you say when I come to you with nothing?” “Fling it down." "I said I had nothing. What shall I let go?"
1 The Eastern Buddhist, Vol. II, pp. 53-54.
