Zen Buddhism

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

Page 18

PREFACE
xiii field. But if these are the reasons for the book, the cause is otherwise, and quite irrational. I wrote it as one writes a poem-because it came.
My qualifications are small. I studied the works of Dr. Suzuki as they appeared; I am editing his Collected Works, and in the course of this tremendous task have re-read the whole of them. I spent seven months in Japan in 1946, and much of this time at the feet of the Master; I have tried to live Zen. But I am not a master of Zen, not even a pupil of one, and the average Zen master, were he to read this book, would probably roar with laughter and put it to useful purposes. But being a poet and not a philosopher, and therefore possessing the power which the poet shares with the child and all great men, of "sitting loose to life" and adding labels to nothing, I offer the fruits of my own experience to those in search of them.
The book should be Zen, but, being in words, it must still be about it. After all, “He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know," as the Tao Te Ching points out: and as Alan Watts quite rightly says, "In writing about Zen there are two extremes to be avoided: the one to define and explain so little that the reader is completely bewildered, and the other to define and explain so much that the reader thinks he understands Zen!"l For one does not understand Zen, any more than one understands breathing or walking. The wise man breathes, and walks on.
It is a difficult book. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “The line that is straightest offers most resistance." It is also
1 The Spirit of Zen, p. 131. 2 Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, MCCURDY, P. 58.