Zen Buddhism

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

Page 90

CHAPTER FOUR
IN SEARCH OF ZEN
ASKED, “What is Zen?", there is only one truthful answer, "That's it!” For Zen is beyond description. It is the life within form and only a form can be described. It refuses to commit itself to any specified pattern of thinking, to conform to the rules of man's imagining, to fill any mould. "It is a world-power, for in so far as men live at all, they live by Zen."1 If this be vague it is not the fault of Zen but the fault of the mind's persistent refusal to focus on truth, preferring the forms of truth. Yet Zen, “though far from indefinite, is by itself indefinable because it is the active principle of life itself.”. Nor is its teaching vague. Coal is black, says Zen. Coal is not black, says Zen. This is clear enough, and both are equally true or untrue. For Zen slips from the grasp out of either trap, affirmation or denial, both of which limit the boundless, cage the illimitable. Below sense is nonsense, where understanding has not reached the plane of formulated truth. Beyond sense lies non-sense, when the limits of all formulation have been transcended, and only a smile or the lifting of a flower can reveal a shared experience.
Zen is a way of looking at life, a rather unusual way. For it is the direct way, whereby all things are seen just as themselves, and not otherwise, and yet at the same time
1 BLYTH, viii. 2 Ibid, 2.
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