Zen Buddhism

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

Page 82

THE NATURE OF ZEN BUDDHISM 61 acquired from innumerable good deeds. But the law of causation is tempered with compassion, for the love of the loving minds of the earth will affect the incidence of woe, and make the suffering to be borne as the result of folly easier to bear. Moreover, Zen, being of the essence of freedom, resents all rules which hamper and confine the mind. According to Dr. Suzuki, this is one of the reasons for the Japanese preference for art over morality. “Morality is regulative, but art creative. The one is an imposition from without, but the other is an irrepressible expression from within."1 Zen, he concludes, therefore, finds its inevitable association with art, but not with morality. For rigid form is a symptom of departing life. "When the great Tao is lost, spring forth benevolence and righteousness. When Wisdom and sagacity arise, there are great hypocrites. Where Tao is, equilibrium is. When Tao is lost, out come all the differences of things." This spiritual principle applies specially to the artificial distinctions of “good” and “bad”, and Taoism is at least consistent in its philosophy in that it has no moral code. “The Sage has no self (to call his own). He makes the self of the people his self. To the good I act with goodness; to the bad I also act with goodness."? Why formulate rules unless the original sense of “right" has been somehow paralysed?
Zen admits that outward conduct must conform with the laws of the State, but the inner life should be above all rules imposed from without. "Definition is always limitation-the 'fixed' and 'changeless' are but terms expressive of a stoppage of growth. People are not taught 1 Zen Buddhism and Its Influence, p. 21. 2 Tao Te Ching, Chaps. 18 and 49.