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ZEN IN ENGLISH
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his belt. Nonsense, in the sense of Lear's original Limericks, is ever on the verge of Zen, whereas Butler's Erewhon is inverted but perfectly sound logic. But meditate on this anonymous jewel,
LITERATURE
"As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there, He wasn't there again today. I wish to God he'd go away!"
Alice, of course, whether in Wonderland or through the Looking-Glass, is full of Zen, and did she not, after filling herself with the White Knight's glorious nonsense (to purge her mind of the last grain of "sense"), run down the hill (go over the precipice), to the edge of the brook, and bound across ("crossing the stream"), and throw herself down (complete "letting go"), on a lawn soft as moss, and find on her head the golden crown of satori? All right, she didn't.
But cannot western poets write haiku? There is, of course, the language difficulty. Japanese haiku are written in Chinese, for though the ideographs are differently pronounced in China and Japan they are formed the same. And the Chinese language, being monosyllabic, is terse and vigorous, and therefore suited to Zen. The overtones and undertones of a series of such ideographs is infinite, and more can be said in a given space than in any other tongue. English is in comparison cumbersome, and even the epigram of two or three lines is usually the brief expression of a "point", witty, satirical or otherwise. A haiku has no point; nor does it strive to be beautiful. It is in Zen the expression of the Zen state of mind, and merely points at the moon; it does not attempt to describe it. In
