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ZEN BUDDHISM has been obstructed by an over-active intellect or excess of sensuality.
To most professing Christians the Sermon on the Mount is only a beautiful precept in a beautiful holy frame; it is considered to be ideal as an ideal, but it is not thought to be practicable in the rough and tumble of usual life. But every now and then the truth breaks through the crust of rationalism, and there is a repetition of the phenomenon of religious conversion, analogous to the sudden enlightenment of Zen Buddhism. It may be, therefore, that what was written in Concentration and Meditation in 1935 is right. “There are many degrees of satori, ranging from a flash of intuitive understanding to pure Samadhi. Presumably the different grades of koan collate with the grades and levels of satori. First, the purely personal prejudices are discarded, followed by the racial or national points of view. As the koan gets more difficult, the claims of humanity begin to predominate until, at the threshold of Samadhi, the individual consciousness is merged in the Universal Mind. Then only is the unconscious of the individual and the unconscious of the universe made one, and self, bereft of any abiding place, dissolves into nothingness."1 But I can imagine a Zen Master, if he happened to read that, saying, "Now that you have got that stuff off your chest, go and clean your boots."
To summarise, whether the final assault on satori be swift or slow, in the end we storm the gates of Heaven, and we do not stand in a queue at the entrance filling in forms. When satori is achieved, whether for a second or for an hour, it is violent, cataclysmic, an unmistakable 1 P. 247.
