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ZEN BUDDHISM
no umbrella in the rain, get wet. Does it matter? All things, your house and your umbrella included, have no validity outside your mind, and even your body will go in a few years, or perhaps tomorrow. All problems, even of the twin illusions of life and death, are alike good fun, if so regarded. Was any man ever the happier for being unhappy about death, and did he live any longer? Is suffering made the less by tears about it? Or another's pain removed by your abundant gloom?
Is all this unintelligible? Then try it, for only so will its worth be known, and it is the key to the "unemotional” approach to life of the Zen student, and his habitual happiness. "I can't make head or tail of it," a friend complained. Why try to make head or tail of it? Zen has no head or tail, and looks the same whether upside down or downside up. Is it unbelievable? Learn to accept the unbelievable as facts, for life is neither believable nor rational. It just is. The White Queen in Alice Through the Looking-Glass actually practised believing the impossible. Sometimes, she claimed, she believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. How much wiser she was than many a modern scientist who, failing to understand some natural law, refuses to believe in it. I do not know the nature of electricity (nor, for that matter, does any scientist) but I use it, and thus believe in it.
And the technique of it all? Start from the middle instead of making the middle the goal. Begin with enlightenment, and all things will be added unto you. "The Chinese author," says Dr. Jung, "always starts from the centre of things, from the point we would call his objective goal; in a word, he begins with the ultimate
