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RESULTS OF SATORI
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with a greater vision of things as they are, we lose our habit of slapping on labels in the belief that the thing is changed or our understanding of it is thereby improved. But the weather remains the weather and your neighbour's wireless your neighbour's wireless, whether your label attached to be printable or unprintable; and Zen is Zen, no more or less, for the long description you choose to attach, or attempt to attach, to its tail. Things just are, and for the first time in his life the master of satori is content to leave them so.
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But, as a friend once said to me, one cannot become extraordinary until one is content to be extra-ordinary, and it seems that it needs a touch of satori before the average man will let go of his ego-phantasy, the belief that he matters in the least, and become what he is, just a drop in the ocean or a grain of sand on its shore. With satori, mountains are once more mountains, and a man but a man, just one particular in the inter-diffusion of all particulars which is Jijimuge. The paradoxes of Zen are thrown away; the koan and mondo are rafts which have borne us to the further shore; they are no more needed. The goose can stay in the bottle, for all we care, and the geese just fly away.
But this serenity, and certainty, and sense of rhythm only begin to operate when satori has not only moved into the mind but has settled down to stay. One flash has no immediate effect on character. Many a man who has known satori is, to his neighbour, none the better for it, but in time the change appears. One of the first results is that rarest of all virtues, genuine humility, and the possessor of satori will neither claim it nor pro-claim it as his own. "Be humble and you will remain entire," is a
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