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ZEN FOR THE WEST
207 fact breaks free from the dogma, either on learning that millions of his fellow men have never even heard of it, and reject the conception when they do, or from a growing strength wherewith to face life as it is, there is a wonderful sense of freedom, as of a burden dropped or a fog that clears away. Of course there is, somewhere "behind" or “beyond” this unreal shadow world, an antithetical Reality, and it is not remarkable that men, immersed in the former, crave for the latter. Hence the great cry, to whatever gods may be, "From the unreal lead me to the Real ... from death to Immortality.” But Zen points out that the unreal and the Real are alike unreal, for both are concepts of the mind. When hot, we crave for a cooling breeze; when cold, for the sun, but neither exists except in relation to the other. Samsara, the “Wheel of Becoming”, and Nirvana, the end of it all, are one.
Granted that the average lazy man prefers to erect a God and then to petition it, with sacrifices of this and that, to do the work of salvation” for him, but because men are lazy it does not follow that their efforts to avoid the work, either that of enlightening themselves, or of destroying the self which stands in the way of enlightenment by utterly dropping it into the arms of God), will prove successful. The God may say, “Come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden," but those who begin the journey may find it a long and arduous road. And when they arrive? “Give us the core," said the small boy to his elder brother, who was eating an apple. “Core, core?" said the latter. “There ain't going to be no core!" What lies at the end of the road to God? I know not, but I firmly suspect that the answer is the summary already
