Ride your horse along the edge of the sword
Hide yourself in the middle of the flames
Blossoms of the fruit tree will bloom in the fire
The sun rises in the evening.
ZEN SAYING

When Zen is studied in this way, it is seen in the context of Chinese and Japanese history. It is seen as a product of the meeting of speculative Indian Buddhism with practical Chinese Taoism and even Confucianism. It is seen in the light of the culture of the T’ang dynasty, and the teachings of various "houses." It is related to other cultural movements. It is studied in its passage into Japan and its integration into Japanese civilization. 2

One offers man and metaphysical enlightenment, the other theological salvation. 2

in the words of D.T. Suzuki, Zen is "beyond the world of opposites, a world 3 built up by intellectual distinction . . . a spiritual world of non-distinction which involves achieving an absolute point of view." Yet this too could easily become a trap if we "distinguished" the Absolute from the nonabsolute in a Western, Platonic way. Suzuki therefore immediately adds, "The Absolute is in no way distinct from the world of discrimination. . . . The Absolute is in the world of opposites and not apart from it." (D.T. Suzuki, The Essence of Buddhism, London, 1946, p. 9) 4 3-4

Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, trans-formed consciousness.

Buddhism itself (more than any "religious system’) points beyond any theological or philosophical "ism." It demands not to be a system (while at the same time, like other religions, presenting a peculiar temptation to systematizers). The real drive of Buddhism is toward an enlightenment which is precisely a breakthrough into what is beyond system, beyond 4 cultural and social rite and belief (even where it accepts many kinds of systematic religious aad cultural superstructures—Tibetan, Burmese, Japanese, etc.).
Now if we reflect a moment, we will realize that in Christianity, too, ‘as well as in Islam, we have various admittedly unusual people who see beyond the "religious" aspect of their faith. Karl Barth for instance—in the pure tradition of Protestantism—protested against calling Christianity "a religion" and vehemently denied that Christian faith could be understood as long as it was seen embedded in social and cultural structures. These structures, he believed, were completely alien to it, and a perversion of it. In Islam, too, the Sufis sought Fana, the extinction of that social and cultural self which was determined by the structural forms of religious customs. This extinction is a breakthrough into a realm of mystical liberty in which is lost and then reconstituted in Baqa—something like the ‘New Man" of Christianity, as understood by the mystics (including the Apostles). "I live," said Paul, "now not I but Christ lives in me." 5 4-5

"The mirror is thoroughly egoless and mindless. If a flower comes it reflects a flower, if a bird comes it reflects a bird. It shows a beautiful object as beautiful, an ugly object as ugly. Everything is revealed as it is. There is no discriminating mind or self-consciousness on the part of the mirror. If something comes, the mirror reflects; if it disappears the mirror just lets it disappear .. . no traces of anything are left behind. Such non-attachment, the state of no-mind, or the truly free working of a mirror is compared here to the pure and lucid wisdom of Buddha." (Zenkei Shibayma, On Zazen Wasan, Kyoto, 1967, p. 28)

What is meant here is that the Zen consciousness does not distinguish and categorize what it sees in terms of social and cultural standards. It does not try to fit things into artificially preconceived structures. It does not judge beauty and ugliness according to canons of taste—even though it may have its own taste. If it seems to judge and distinguish, it does so only enough to point beyond judgment to the pure void. It does not settle down in its judgment as final. It does not erect its judgment into a structure to be defended against all comers. Here we can fruitfully reflect on the deep meaning of Jesus’ saying: "Judge not, and you will not be judged." Be- 6 yond its moral implications, familiar to all, there is a Zen dimension to this word of the Gospel. Only when this Zen dimension is grasped will the moral bearing of it be fully clear! 7 6-7

The trouble is that as long as you are given to distinguishing, judging, categorizing and classifying—or even contemplating—you are superimposing something else on the pure mirror. You are filtering the light through a system as if convinced that this will improve the light.

when one breaks through the limits of cultural and structural religion—or irreligion—one is liable to end up, by "birth in the Spirit," or just by intellectual awakening, in a simple void where all is liberty because all is the actionless action, called by the Chinese Wuwei and by the New Testament the "freedom of the Sons of God." Not that they are theologically one and the same, but they have at any rate the same kind of limitlessness, the same lack of inhibition, the same psychic fullness of creativity, which mark the fully integrated maturity of the "enlightened self."

A fuller and truer expression of Zen in Christian experience is given by Meister Eckhart. He admits that: "To be a proper abode for God and fit for God to act in, a man should also be free from all things and actions, both inwardly and outwardly."

Eckhart goes on to say that there is much more: "A man should be so poor that he is not and has not a place for God to act in. To reserve a place would be to maintain distinctions." "A man should be so disinterested and untrammeled that he does not know what God is doing in him." For, he continues, "If it is the case that man is emptied of all things, creatures, himself and god, and if god could still fund a place in him to act. . . this man is not poor with the most intimate poverty. For God does not intend that man should have a place reserved for him to work in since true poverty of spirit requires that man shall be emptied of god and all his works so that if God wants to act in the soul he himself must be the place in which he acts. . . . (God takes then) responsibility for his own action and (is) himself the scene of the action, for God is one who acts within himself." (R.B. Blakney, Meister Eckhart, a Modern Translation, Sermon "Blessed are the Poor," N. Y., 1941, p. 231)

like equation of God as infinite abyss and ground (cf. Sunyata), with the true being of the self grounded in Him; hence it is that Eckhart believes: only when there is no self left as a "place" in which God acts, only when God acts purely in Himself, do we at last recover our "true self" (which is in Zen terms "no-self"). "It is here, in this poverty, that man regains the eternal being that once he was, now is and evermore shall be."

The tragedy is that our consciousness is totally alienated from this inmost ground of our identity. And in Christian mystical tradition, this inner split and alienation is the real meaning of "original sin."

Curiously, then, for Eckhart, it is when we lose our special, separate cultural and religious identity—the "self" or "persona" that is the subject of virtues as well as visions, that perfects itself by good works, that advances in the practice of piety—that Christ is finally born in us in the highest sense. (Eckhart does not deny the sacramental teaching of the birth of Christ in us by baptism, but he is interested in something more fully developed.) 12

Curiously, then, for Eckhart, it is when we lose our special, separate cultural and religious identity—the "self" or "persona" that is the subject of virtues as well as visions, that perfects itself by good works, that advances in the practice of piety—that Christ is finally born in us in the highest sense. (Eckhart does not deny the sacramental teaching of the birth of Christ in us by baptism, but he is interested in something more fully developed.) Obviously these teachings of Eckhart were found very disturbing. His taste for paradox, his deliberate use of expressions which outraged conventional religious susceptibilities, in order to awaken his hearers to a new dimension of experience, left him open to the attacks of his enemies. Some of his teachings were officially condemned by the Church—and many of these are being reinterpreted today by scholars in a fully orthodox sense. 12-13

Seen in relation to those Zen Masters on the other side of the earth who, like him, deliberately used extremely paradoxical expressions, we can detect in him the same kind of consciousness as theirs. Whatever Zen may be, however you define it, it is somehow there in Eckhart. 13

"The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out, for if you want the kernel you must break the shell. And therefore if you want to discover nature’s nakedness you must destroy its symbols, and the farther you get in the nearer you come to its essence. When you come to the One that gathers all things up into itself, there you must stay." (Blakney, Meister Eckhart, p. 148) 13

But the new, secular, "post-Christian" Christianity, which is activistic, antimystical, social and revolutionary, tends to take for granted a great deal of the Marxist assumptions about religion as the opium of the people. In fact, these movements aspire to a kind of Christian repentance on this point, and seek with the greatest fervor to prove that there is no opium about us! 15

But the new, secular, "post-Christian" Christianity, which is activistic, antimystical, social and revolutionary, tends to take for granted a great deal of the Marxist assumptions about religion as the opium of the people. In fact, these movements aspire to a kind of Christian repentance on this point, and seek with the greatest fervor to prove that there is no opium about us! 20

The question arises: which outlook comes closer to the primitive Christian experience? Is the supposedly "static" and metaphysical outlook really a rupture and a contradiction, violating the purity of the original Christian awareness? Is the "dynamic" and "existential" approach a return to the primitive view? Must we choose between them? 21

Modern consciousness then tends to create this solipsistic bubble of awareness—an ego-self imprisoned in its own consciousness, isolated and out of touch with other such selves in so far as they are all "things" rather than persons. 22

but once there has been an inner illumination of pure reality, an awareness of the Divine, the empirical self is seen by comparison to be "nothing," that is to say contingent, evanescent, relatively unreal, real only in relation to its source and end in God, considered not as object but as free ontological source of one’s own existence and subjectivity. 26The new Christian consciousness, which tends to reject the Being of God as irrelevant (or even to accept as perfectly obvious the "death of God"), must be seen to be an entirely different matter. Here there is no metaphysical intuition of Being, and hence "being" is reduced to an abstract concept, a cipher to figure with, a purely logical entity, surely nothing to be concretely experienced. What is experienced as primary is not "being" or "isness" but individual consciousness, reflexive ego-awareness. This distinction is very important indeed, because if the primary datum of experience and the ultimate test of all truth is simply the self-awareness of the conscious subject, verifying what is obvious to its own consciousness, then that self-awareness would seem to block off and inhibit any real intuition of being. By the nature of the case, being, in this new situation, presents itself not as an immediate datum of intuitive consciousness but as an object of empirical observation—which, as a matter of fact, it cannot possibly be. This has many important consequences. For such a consciousness, a nonobjective metaphysical or mystical intuition becomes, in practice, incomprehensible. The very notion of Being is nonviable, irrelevant and even absurd. 26-27

Let us remember that the modern consciousness deals more and more with signs rather than with things, let alone persons. The reason for this is that signs are necessary to simplify the overcrowding of the consciousness with objects. The plain facts of modern life make this unavoidable. But it is also very crippling and divisive. 30-31

Zen can sound, at times, frankly and avowedly irreligious. And it is, in the sense that it makes a direct attack on formalism and myth, and regards conventional religiosity as a hindrance to mature spiritual development. 33

Buddhist philosophy is an interpretation of ordinary human experience, but an interpretation which is not revealed by God nor discovered in the access of inspiration nor seen in a mystical light. Basically, Buddhist metaphysics is a very simple and natural elaboration of the implications of Buddha’s own experience of enlightenment. Buddhism does not seek primarily to understand or to "believe in" the enlightenment of Buddha as the solution to all human problems, but seeks an existential and empirical participation in that enlightenment experience. 35-36

For Zen, from the moment fact is transferred to a statement it is falsified. One ceases to grasp the naked reality of experience and one grasps a form of words instead. 36

The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing. 36-37

The Zen experience is a direct grasp of the unity of the invisible and the visible, the noumenal and the phenomenal, or, if you prefer, an experiential realization that any such division is bound to be pure imagination. 37

D.T. Suzuki says: "Tasting, seeing, experiencing, living—all these demonstrate that there is something common to enlightenment-experience and our sense-experience; the one takes place in our innermost being, the other on the periphery of our consciousness. Personal experience thus seems to be the foundation of Buddhist philosophy. In this sense Buddhism is radical empiricism or experientialism, whatever dialectic later developed to probe the meaning of the enlightenment experience." (D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, N. Y., 1957, p. 48) 37

Buddhist meditation, but above all that of Zen, seeks not to explain but to pay attention, to become aware, to be mindful, in other words to develop a certain kind of consciousness that is above and beyond deception by verbal formulas—or by emotional excitement. 38

Zen, then, aims at a kind of certainty: but it is not the logical certainty of philosophical proof, still less the religious certainty that comes with the acceptance of the word of God by the obedience of faith. It is rather the certainty that goes with an authentic metaphysical intuition which is also existential and empirical. The purpose of all Buddhism is to refine the consciousness until this kind of insight is attained, and the religious implications of the insight are then variously worked out and applied to life in the different Buddhist traditions. 38

Too often the Catholic has imagined himself obliged to stop short at a mere correct and external belief expressed in good moral behavior, instead of entering fully into the life of hope and love consummated by union with the invisible God "in Christ and in the Spirit," thus fully sharing in the Divine Nature. (Ephesians 2:18, 2 Peter 1:4, Col. 1:9-17, 1 John 4:12-12) 40

what do we mean by Christianity, and what do we mean by Buddhism? Is Christianity Christian Theology? Ethics? Mysticism? Worship? Is our idea of Christianity to be taken without further qualification as the Roman Catholic Church? Or does it include Protestant Christianity? The Protestantism of Luther or that of Bonhoeffer? The Protestantism of the God-is-dead school? The Catholicism of St. Thomas? Of St. Augustine and the Western Church Fathers? A supposedly "pure" Christianity of the Gospels? A demythologized Christianity? A "social Gospel"? 41

The immense variety of forms taken by thought, experience, worship, moral practice, in both Buddhism and Christianity make all comparisons haphazard, and in the end, when someone like the late Dr. Suzuki announced a study on Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, it turned out to be, rather practically in fact, a comparison between Meister Eckhart and Zen. To narrow the field in this way is at least relevant, though to take Meister Eckhart as representative of Christian mysticism is hazardous. At the same time we must remark that Dr. Suzuki was much too convinced that Eckhart was unusual in his time, and that his statements must have shocked most of his contemporaries. Eckhart’s condemnation was in fact due in some measure to rivalry between Dominicans and Franciscans, and his teaching, bold and in some points unable to avoid condemnation, was nevertheless based on St. Thomas to a great extent and belonged to a mystical tradition that was very much alive and was, in fact, the most vital religious force in the Catholicism of his time. Yet to identify Christianity with Eckhart would be completely misleading. That was not what Suzuki intended. He was not comparing the mystical theology of Eckhart with the Buddhist philosophy of the Zen Masters, but the experience of Eckhart, ontologically and psychologically, with the experience of the Zen Masters. This is a reasonable enterprise, offering some small hope of interesting and valid results. 41-42

Is it therefore possible to say that both Christians and Buddhists can equally well practice Zen? Yes, if by Zen we mean precisely the quest for direct and pure experience on a metaphysical level, liberated from verbal formulas and linguistic preconceptions. 44

it strives, like all Buddhism, to make man completely free and independent even in his striving for salvation and enlightenment. Independent of what? Of merely external supports and authorities which keep him from having access to and making use of the deep resources in his own nature and psyche. 45Zen is perfectly compatible with Christian belief and indeed with Christian mysticism (if we understand Zen in its pure state, as metaphysical intuition). If this is true, then we must admit it is perfectly logical to admit, with the Zen Masters, that "Zen teaches nothing." 47

the true purpose of Zen: awakening a deep ontological awareness, a wisdom-intuition (Prajna) in the ground of the being of the one awakened. And in fact, the pure consciousness of Prajna would not be pure and immediate if it were a consciousness that one understands Prajna. 48

The convenient tools of language enable us to decide beforehand what we think things mean, and tempt us all too easily to see things only in a way that fits our logical preconceptions and our verbal formulas. Instead of seeing things and facts as they are we see them as reflections and verifications of the sentences we have previously made up in our minds. We quickly forget how to simply see things and substitute our words and our formulas for the things themselves, manipulating facts so that we see only what conveniently fits our prejudices. Zen uses language against itself to blast out these preconceptions and to destroy the specious "reality" in our minds so that we can see directly. Zen is saying, as Wittgenstein said, "Don’t think: Look!" 48

"Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points." (Suzuki Introduction, p. 38) 49

Suffering, as both Christianity and Buddhism see, each in its own way, is part of our very ego-identity and empirical existence, and the only thing to do about it is to plunge right into the middle of contradiction and confusion in order to be transformed by what Zen calls the "Great Death" and Christianity calls "dying and rising with Christ." 51

If one reaches the point where understanding fails, this is not a tragedy: it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking. Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all: perhaps we only need to wake up. 53

the power of Christ living in him as the ground of a totally new life and a new being. (I Cor. 2:1-4, cf. Eph. 1 :18-23, Gal. 6:14-16) 55

""I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me." (Gal. 2:19-20; see also Romans 8:5-17) To receive the word of the Cross means the acceptance of a complete self-emptying, a Kenosis, in union with the self-emptying of Christ "obedient unto death." (Phil. 2:5-11) It is essential to true Christianity that this experience of the Cross and of self-emptying be central in the life of the Christian so that he may fully receive the Holy Spirit and know (again by experience) all the riches of God in and through Christ. (John 14:16-17, 26; 15:26-27; 16:7-15) 55-56

Just as no one can know my inner self except my own "spirit," so no one can know God except God’s Spirit; yet this Holy Spirit is given to us, in such a way that God knows Himself in us, and this experience is utterly real, though it cannot be communicated in terms understandable to those who do not share it. (See I Cor. 2:7-15.) Consequently, St. Paul concludes, "we have the mind of Christ." (I Cor. 2:16) Now when we see that for Buddhism Prajna is describable as "having the Buddha mind" we understand that there must surely be some possibility of finding an analogy somewhere between Buddhist and Christian experience, though we are now speaking more in terms of doctrine than of pure experience. Yet the doctrine is about the experience. We cannot push our investigation further here, but it is significant that Suzuki, reading the following lines from Eckhart (which are perfectly orthodox and traditional Catholic theology), said they were "the same as Prajna intuition!’ (D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 40; the quotation from C. de B. Evans’ translation of Eckhart, London, 1924, p. 147) "In giving us His love God has given us the Holy Ghost so that we can love Him with the love wherewith He loves Himself." The Son Who, in us, loves the Father, in the Spirit, is translated thus by Suzuki into Zen terms: "one mirror reflecting another with no shadow between them." (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 41) Suzuki also frequently quotes a sentence of Eckhart’s: "The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me" (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 50) as an exact expression of what Zen means by Prajna. 56-57

This would seem to indicate that the real area for investigation of analogies and correspondences between Christianity and Zen might after all be theology rather than psychology or asceticism. At least theology is not excluded, but it must be theology as experienced in Christian contemplation, not the speculative theology of textbooks and disputations. 58

Yet Christianity too has its tradition of apophatic contemplation of knowledge in "unknowing," while the last words I remember Dr. Suzuki saying (before the usual good-byes) were "The most important thing is Love!" I must say that as a Christian I was profoundly moved. Truly Prajna and Karuna are one (as the Buddhist says), or Caritas (love) is indeed the highest knowledge. 61-62

found for example that in my dialogue with him (see page 99), he was able to use the mythical language in which the Fall of Man is described, in the Bible and the Church Fathers, to distinct advantage psychologically and spiritually. He spoke quite naturally and easily of the implications of the "Fall" in terms of man’s alienation from himself, and he did so in just the same simple natural way as the Fathers of the Church like St. Augustine or St. Gregory of Nyssa did. If the truth be told, there is a great deal in common in the psychological and spiritual insight of the Church Fathers and in the psychoanalytically oriented Christian existential thinking of men like Tillich, himself more influenced than many realized by the Augustinian tradition. 63-64

The whole reality of the "Fall" is inscribed in our nature in what Jung called symbolic archetypes, and the Fathers of the Church (as well as the Biblical writers too no doubt) were much more concerned with this archetypal significance than with the Fall as an "historical event." Others besides Dr. Suzuki have, without being Christians, intuitively grasped the importance of this symbol. Two names spring to mind: Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst, and that remarkable and too-little known poet Edwin Muir, the translator into English of Franz Kafka. 64

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104-108 knowledge of good and evil
108-111 poor in spirit
115 the recovery of paradise

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