________________
ZEN IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 185
their city be greater than Babylon of old, though they mine a league into the earth or mount to the stars on wings--what of
them? Hassan: They will be but a dark patch upon the world,
For poets see, and bring their visions, or their satori, to earth as men have need of them. Thus somewhere in English verse the major truths of the East have found expression. “Nearly every thought expressed in Buddhist and Hindu literature finds expression in the Western world also; and it could not be otherwise, for the value of these thoughts is universal. The East has advanced beyond the West only in their wider and fuller acceptance."1 Brave words, and may the West prove worthy of them.
But many a famous poet just misses it. "To see a world in a grain of sand” is excellent mysticism, and splendid pantheism, but it is not Zen. Compare this with Tennyson's "flower in the crannied wall”.
"If I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.” How right he is, for of such is the kingdom of satori. Donne has it too. “God is so omnipresent ... that God is an angel in an angel, and a stone in a stone, and a straw in a straw.”He is also a flower in a crannied wall or in a jam-jar.
Good poets, poets worthy of the name, look direct at things. Wrote Whitman:
1 Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, COOMARASWAMY, P. 257, 2 JOHN DONNE, Sermon VII.
