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CHAPTER ELEVEN
ZEN FOR THE WEST
Zen is life, and Zen Buddhism is but one of its forms. Zen has always been, in one form or another, a world-power, for, as R. H. Blyth points out, in so far as men live at all, they live by Zen. “Wherever there is a poetical action, a religious aspiration, a heroic thought, a union of the Nature within a man and the Nature without, there is Zen. But in Japan," he adds, "where by tradition and training the ego is kept at its smallest and weakest, where every man is a poet, Zen is both universally diffused and finds its greatest exemplars at the present time."!
But will they always remain there? It is true that forms, like old wines, travel badly, and such exemplars of Zen as may arise in the West will create and use new forms in which to express, and teach, the nature of and the way to Zen. If, therefore, the West is to adopt and assimilate Zen, in the sense of a direct, dynamic approach to life, o'erleaping the hurdles of ritual, religion and concept which men impose between themselves and the thing they seek, the old wine must find new bottles, and be fitted into the pattern of western prejudice and ways of thought.
The obvious difficulty lies in the absence of Zen masters, nor is there any likelihood that a quantity of those who have attained that long “maturing" which precedes the
1 BLYTH, P. vii.
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