Zen. Alan Watts
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surreptitious. By the time of his ordination, he had grown impatient with the strictures of the Church and with what he felt was an untenable narrow-mindedness among its leaders. Two years after the US publication of Zen, he submitted his resignation to Bishop Wallace Conkling with, as Joan Watts notes, “a barrage of criticism of the Church.”|| She quotes a letter to his friends in which he wrote, “During the past years I have continued my studies of the spiritual teachings of the Orient, alongside with Catholic theology, and, though I have sometimes doubted it, I am now fully persuaded that the Church’s claim to be the best of all ways to God is not only a mistake, but also a symptom of anxiety.”¶
Zen presents an eminently accessible overview of Buddhist teachings, calling for the cessation of grasping and rejecting the inherent dualism of any intellectual formula. Rather than trying to possess God, he wrote, it was necessary to allow God — and life — to possess you. For Watts, to be fully alive was the essence of Zen; it could not be defined. How could one convey that essence? Only through immediate insight into the nature of Reality. It could only be transmitted, as Buddha did while holding up a flower, silently. Words would always and immediately lead to concepts, creating an intellectual divide between the nowness of spiritual experience and any attempt to define it.
Nonetheless, Watts was in love with words. Ever the scholar of comparative religions, he offers in Zen a brief overview of the Hindu Upanishads, early Indian Mahayana Buddhism, Chinese Taoism and Confucianism, and the development of Zen monastic practice in Tang dynasty China and in Japan, noting that Mahayana Buddhism was “somewhat infected with the characteristically Indian desire to escape from the world of form, but in China it lost this desire almost entirely.”** Zen Buddhism, for Watts, was “the synthesis of the contemplative insight of Indian religion, the dynamic liveliness of Taoism, and the down-to-earthness of Confucianism.”††
In the process of writing Zen, Watts was keenly aware of how quickly one can get entangled in dualism, warning his readers not to form “the concept of a pure and unchanging consciousness separate and apart from the changing forms of thoughts and things.” He was encouraging the “perpetual self-abandonment” to the pure Mind, “an identification of itself with its changing forms, which in Christian language would be called the divine love.” It’s not “that we have to make the pure Mind perform this act of self-abandonment,” he noted; “it does it by itself all the time, in us and through us.”††
Zen’s final section addresses the instantaneous action through self-abandonment found in the traditional Zen arts, whether in calligraphic brushstrokes or haiku, flower arranging or stone gardens, tea ceremony or archery — and the deep training and discipline necessary for that instantaneous action to be authentic.
It’s remarkable how in such a slender volume — what he called his little booklet — Watts could convey Zen’s challenges and its possibilities for life-changing breakthroughs. More than an outline or overview, Zen itself is like a haiku, a condensation of profundity that beckons to new understandings.
— Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat
Abbot of the Zen Studies Society, New York, 2019
* See p. 17.
† Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, p. xiii.
‡ Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, p. 8.
§ Quoted in Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, p. 254.
|| Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, p. 261.
¶ Ibid.
** See p. 33.
†† See p. 37.
‡‡ See pp. 48–49.
THE SUBSTANCE OF THIS ESSAY was first published in England in 1947 under the title Zen Buddhism: A New Outline and Introduction. The present American edition has been enlarged and revised with a view to providing an up-to-date and comprehensive outline of Zen Buddhism for the increasing number of students of a subject upon which all major works have long been out of print. Since writing The Spirit of Zen (London, 1936; reprinted 1948) many valuable sources of information on the general nature of Zen have been available to me, and the present work, though brief, will in several important respects provide a corrective to the former volume.
I am indebted, as ever, to Dr. D. T. Suzuki for his translations of original material, the greater part of those quoted being his unless otherwise indicated. I am also indebted for much general information upon the subject to the late Sokei-an Sasaki, Abbot of Jofuku-in, who lived and taught for many years in New York, though I do not wish to make him responsible for any of the opinions given lest they should be in error. Some of this information I owe also to Mrs. Sasaki, who let me read many of the manuscripts of his lectures and translations, and discussed them with me, though, for the same reason, I must not make her responsible either. It is a pleasure to me, however, to have this opportunity of expressing thanks to them all.
At the end of the book will be found a bibliography and an explanation of the drawings, symbols, and Chinese characters used as chapter headings.
Alan W. Watts,
Canterbury House, Evanston, Illinois, 1948
THERE IS NOTHING THAT MEN DESIRE MORE than life — the fullness of life, Reality itself. In one form or another they try to possess it by every possible means, as happiness, as power, as joy, as wealth, as spiritual insight, and even as simple existence to which they cling with all their might for fear that it will be taken away. But one thing is certain: the harder you try to possess life, the faster it slips away from you, and the less you understand of its mystery. For life itself, whatever it may be, cannot be grasped in any form, whether of matter, of emotion, or of thought. The moment you try to hold it in a fixed form, you miss it. Water drawn from the stream is no longer living water, for it ceases to flow. This is what the Buddha meant in saying that the cause of all human misery was trishna or selfish craving, because trishna is the attempt to grasp life in some form, more especially in the form of one’s own personal existence. Man can only become alive in the fullest sense when he no longer tries to grasp life, when he releases his own life from the stranglehold of possessiveness so that it can go free and be itself.
In practice, almost all religions are attempts to grasp the mystery of life in either an intellectual formula or an emotional experience. Wherever it may be found, higher religion involves the discovery that this cannot be done, and that therefore man must relax his fearful grip upon life or God and permit it to possess him as, in fact, it does all the time whether he knows it or not. Zen Buddhism is a unique example of this kind of higher religion, and because the word “Zen” indicates this very spiritual state of full liveliness and non-grasping, it is really impossible to define Zen. Nevertheless, Zen has a philosophical and religious history by means of which we can arrive at some suggestion of its meaning.
As a specific form of Buddhism, Zen is first found