Word: zen
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Long rooted in Japan, Zen is an ancient Chinese technique of mind-breaking discipline aimed at freeing the will. All things bubble along in one interrelated continuum, says Zen. Why try to "grasp" or "stop" them? The real problem is spontaneity: how to "let go" and "go with" the permanent impermanence. The Zen disciple must destroy his ego-consciousness, until his real self calmly floats on the world's confusion like a pingpong ball skimming down a mountain stream...
...Anglo-Saxons, says Author Alan W. Watts, former Anglican priest and a leading U.S. exponent of Zen, the main obstacle to the achievement of Zen's peace is an inability to purge themselves of the need for self-justification. This urge to prove oneself right "has always jiggled the Chinese sense of the ludicrous." The Chinese rated human-heartedness ahead of righteousness, felt that one could not be right without also being wrong. "At the roots of Chinese life there is a trust in the good-and-evil of one's own nature which is peculiarly foreign...
Floating on the Ocean. Watts feels that Westerners are attracted by Zen partly because it shuns supernaturalism. "In Zen the safari experience of awakening to our 'original inseparability' with the universe seems, however elusive, always just around the corner. One has even met people to whom it has happened, and they are no longer mysterious occultists in the Himalayas nor skinny yogis in cloistered ashrams. They are just like us, and yet much more at home in the world, floating much more easily upon the ocean of transience and insecurity...
...Westerner who would understand Zen, there is one prerequisite: "He must really have come to terms with the Lord God Jehovah and with his Hebrew-Christian conscience so that he can take it or leave it without fear of rebellion. He must be free of the itch to justify himself. Lacking this, his Zen will be either 'beat' or 'square,' either a revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stuffiness and respectability...
...Fuss. The Beat Generation have Zen wrong. "Because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say 'To hell with it,' nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes." Square Zen is just as far off the true beam. It is "the Zen of established tradition in Japan, with its clearly defined hierarchy, its rigid discipline, and its specific tests of satori." Though far better than "the common-or-garden squareness of the Rotary Club or the Presbyterian Church ... it is still square because it is a quest for the right spiritual...