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ZEN BUDDHISM
things, but circulates according to its own law." Indeed the preparations include the acceptance of all limitations of Karma, for to refuse to accept them, or anything whatsoever, is to perpetuate the division between this and that of which satori is the end. Yet even the attempt to acquire satori must at the final moment be cast away. "The Tao," says Alan Watts, "is not brought to birth by deep philosophical understanding or by any effort of action or emotion, although it is necessary and inevitable that one of these attempts should precede the birth. The birth itself, however, only takes place when the futility of the attempt has been fully realised, and that realisation can only come through making the attempt." "'2 But this is only another of the countless paradoxes which, like a hedgehog's prickles, stand erect at the entrance to satori. Another is that with the approach to satori the mind is enormously expanded and contracted at the same time. "Each single fact of experience is to be related to the totality of things, for thereby it gains for the first time its meaning." The part is the whole, and the whole of it, and if that is not difficult enough to understand, be pleased to notice that the part is greater than the whole. For the whole is complete, which is finite; the part is unfinished, and that is infinite. . . . But at the same time the mind is enormously lessened in content, being contracted to the needle point of this and here and now. Philosophers speak of a lessening of the not-Self till the self is all, and of a growing of the Self till the self is squeezed out of existence. Zen does both at once. And the oil in the machine for this fearful effort? Laughter,
1 The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 57.
2 The Legacy of Asia and Western Man, p. 106.
