Zen Buddhism

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

Page 91

66.
ZEN BUDDHISM seen as the interfused aspects of a whole. In Zen all things are ends in themselves, while having no end. To the pure all things are pure; to the Essence of Mind all things just are. And the nearer we are to the Essence of Mind the nearer we are to the things about us which are and yet are not the Essence of Mind. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow ...," said Jesus. “Consider the flower in the crannied wall," said Tennyson. Consider anything you please, but just consider it, not as a symbol of eternity, as God in miniature, as a moral lesson or a Great White Hope, but just consider it. "Mysticism uses the object, the finite, as a telescope to look into the infinite. Zen looks at the telescope.”1 As the Master Jimyo said, "As soon as one particle of dust is raised; the great earth manifests itself there in its entirety.” It is there, all of it, not symbolically, but actually. There is no need to do more than just to consider it, whatever it may be. The flower is enjoyed for what it is, not otherwise, and he who can rightly look at a flower, without a shadow of ought else intervening, is looking at Zen. Thereafter he is in direct communion with all living things, and who shall hate these toes and fingers of his larger self which lie on the mind's periphery? For they are God, if you care to call them so, or Reality, and therefore deserving the gesture which a lover of Zen may pay with the raised hands of respect to a landscape or a noble picture or even to his bowl of tea. Or they are brothers, born of the same father, life, out of the same mother, illusion; or they just are.
For those who prefer the language of modern psychology, he who has achieved this power of direct and 1 BLYTH, 216.