Zen Buddhism

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: William Heinemann LTD

Page 31

IO
ZEN BUDDHISM has its being within and because of the absolute Reality which, on account of the incommensurable otherness of its eternal nature, we can never hope to describe, even though it is possible for us directly to apprehend it.”l
Viewing the complex entity of the self in terms of its ascending powers we have, beyond the senses, the emotions, and beyond them the workaday practical mind. This analytic, concrete mind is sooner or later used by a higher faculty, the abstract and synthetic mind. This, in Buddhist philosophy, creates the man as we know him. As the most famous of all Buddhist Scriptures has it:
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is compounded of our thoughts, made up of our thoughts." 2 Between the lower and the higher aspects of the mind is a bridge in the crossing of which the faculty of Buddhi, the intuition, begins to illumine the intellect. The type of thought is immaterial, so that it be high, reaching ever for the abstract and impersonal ultimates wherein true wisdom dwells. On such a plane the musician, the mathematician, the philosopher and the mystic find they are walking and working side by side. Here self begins to doubt itself, and the vast sweep of the impersonal commands the attention of the awakening mind. Yet there is no severance between the two aspects of the mind, however fierce the tension. The lower clings to the earth, the higher strives for the splendour of the windy sky. The two are one, and sooner or later are seen as such. Dr. Jung has enriched our understanding of the mind with a
1 The Perennial Philosophy, p. 42. 2 Dhammapada, Verse I.