Zen Buddhism

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

Page 19

xiv
PREFACE
largely nonsense, and the original title of the book was in fact What nonsense! An Enquiry into Zen Buddhism. But with such a title it might be classified on the bookstalls with the usual forms of nonsense, and those who bought it as such might be cross to find super-sense inside it.
Professor J. B. Pratt relates that when he first contacted Zen he found it "unspeakably queer". So it is, deliciously so, for though we know about nonsense and much about sense, when we rise still higher to what is nonsense because it is super-sense we are truly through the Looking-Glass, and the fun begins, and with it the battle and the joy thereof. In terms of this classification, the book is written at the level of sense, but retires at times into nonsense in order the better to leap into non-sense, or the light of Zen. Please read it as such.
American readers will note that the book was serialised in the Theosophical Forum, the Journal of the Theosophical Society, Covina, California, edited by Colonel Arthur L. Conger.
I thank herewith Dr. Suzuki, who gave us Zen, and R. H. Blyth, whose sixteen years in Korea have taught him a world of Zen from which I have, with the help of his Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, picked such crumbs as I may. I am grateful to Alan Watts for his brilliant words on Zen, and to that brave man W.J. Gabb, who, in his lectures to the Buddhist Society, London, revealed so much of his Zen experience. I am grateful to those who have tried to fair-copy my original typing and temperamental corrections; to my wife, who allowed me to walk in a dazzle of Zen while I bumped into the furniture; to those who corrected the proofs and then, to my surprise and shattered feelings, asked me