Zen Buddhism

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

Page 44

BEYOND THE
INTELLECT
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try to accord with it you will get away from it," was the reply. "If any man be unhappy," said the Greek slave, Epictetus, "let him know that it is by reason of himself alone."
Or, as Count Keyserling said, somewhat later,
"One ought to get so far as to become entirely independent of the accident of one's external surroundings, that is to say, one ought to have such complete mastery over one's inner surroundings that, by changing it at will, as the chameleon changes his colour, one would attain what is otherwise only more or less attainable by the shrewd consideration of external influences."1
All of which the Patriarch Wei Lang expressed more pithily by saying
"Our mind should stand aloof from circumstances, and on no account should we allow them to influence the function of our mind."2
So much for a rapid survey of an enormous subject. It is enough to add that Zen is first and last a matter of experience. Hence the suggestion that he who fears the experience, or still believes that the counters of conceptual thought will serve as substitutes, should abandon now this humble attempt to feed the awakening faculty of immediate knowledge with the truth of Zen. Words have their uses, but the noblest words are but noises in the air. They die, and in the end is silence, silence and a finger pointing the Way.
1 Travel Diary of a Philosopher, II, 132.
2 The Sutra of Wei Lang, p. 49.