The terms are different, but here is the principal meeting point of Taoism and Mahayana, for, as we read in the Lankavatara, “If they only realized it, they are already in the Tathagata’s Nirvana, for, in Noble Wisdom, all things are in Nirvana from the beginning.” Or, as the Christian says, if you will accept the Grace of God, you are saved as you are. The principle seems an outrage on common sense, backed by the egoism of moral ambition, and in a very complicated universe it seems much too simple, much too ludicrous to be true. Yet, says Lao Tzu,
When the superior scholar is told of Tao
He works hard to practise it.
When the middling scholar is told of Tao,
It seems that sometimes he keeps it and sometimes he loses it.
When the inferior scholar is told of Tao,
He laughs aloud at it.
If it were not laughed at, it would not be sufficient to be Tao.
Zen Buddhism in China
The differences between Taoism on the one hand and Vedanta and Buddhism on the other probably arise from the difference of climate in China and India. The idea of Tao is rather more dynamic than that of Brahman; Tao is the ever-moving, momentary course of things, while Brahman is the eternal and the unchanging. The Hindu is leisurely and, like tropical vegetation, his mind is prolix, whereas the Chinese are rather less leisurely, for their land is none too fruitful and in their thoughts they are correspondingly brief and to the point. They rebelled against the wordiness of Hindu Buddhism and also against its tendency to seek wisdom in withdrawal from the world and in lofty states of consciousness without any relation to practical life. For the Hindus did not always follow the teachings of Mahayana to their logical conclusion, and it took Chinese good sense to practice what the profundity of the Hindu mind had conceived. Therefore toward the end of the eighth century AD the Chinese had evolved a form of Buddhism which combined all the virtues of Buddhism and Taoism, and, I cannot feel by mere chance, the rise of this Chinese school of Buddhism coincided with the golden age of Chinese culture in the dynasties of T’ang, Sung, and Yuan. In Chinese this school was known as Ch’an, but in the West it is more generally known by its Japanese name of Zen, and it has been summed up as
A direct transmission [of Enlightenment] outside the scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the soul of man;
Seeing into one’s own nature and attaining Buddhahood.
For the founders of the Zen school believed, and rightly, that the secret of enlightenment can never be conveyed in any form of words or contained in any system of ideas. Nonduality or total acceptance defies all intellectual description, being a condition of the spirit having no opposite with which it may be contrasted and so understood. “Enlightenment,” according to a Zen teacher, “is your everyday thought”—and yet, what is it that makes the difference between an ordinary man and a Buddha? In accordance with the Taoist feeling for the moment, they called Zen the sudden as distinct from the gradual school of Buddhism, for its object is to see into one’s own nature at this moment and so realize that one’s own nature is “Buddha nature.” As Tao-wu said, “If you want to see it, see into it directly; but when you stop to think about it, it is altogether missed.” Zen as a technique is designed to solve the following problem: How, without resorting to the confusion of intellectualism, are we to demonstrate the oneness of Nirvana and sangsara, of Tao and life, and of spiritual freedom and everyday experience? If we say in so many words that Tao is what you are experiencing at this moment, this is no more than a concept. Furthermore, whenever we say that this or that is Tao, we are still speaking in terms of dualism; we are joining two things together that were never in need of joining, and still keeping in the back of our minds the distinction between “this” on the one hand and “Tao” on the other. In other words, the idea of Tao, Buddha, Nirvana, Brahman, or whatever it may be, is only confusing while it remains an idea, a concept over, above, and apart from ordinary experience. So how can we demonstrate Tao as a reality instead of a concept? How can we point to life and show man that it is Tao and that it can set him free without calling it by that name? After all, Tao and Nirvana are only names for an experience; those who invented them had the experience first and gave it its name afterward, but now people are so busy learning about the names that they forget the experience.
The method of teaching evolved by the Zen masters was therefore a kind of spiritual “shock tactics” designed to demonstrate the experience itself in so concrete and forceful a manner that the disciple would be brought to a sudden realization. We have already recounted the somewhat unusual method used by Hui-neng to awaken the thief who tried to steal his robe and bowl, but his successors resorted to even more unusual tactics. The following examples have been rendered by Dr. D. T. Suzuki from early Chinese sources.
Zen master Bokuju was once asked, “We have to dress and eat every day, and how can we escape from all that?” The master replied, “We dress; we eat.” “I do not understand.” “If you do not understand, put on your dress and eat your food.”
When Gensha was treating an officer to tea the latter asked, “What does it mean when they say that in spite of our having it every day we do not know it?” Gensha took up a piece of cake and offered it to him. After eating the cake, the officer repeated the question, thinking the master had not heard him, whereat Gensha replied, “Only that we do not know it even when we are using it every day.”
On another occasion a disciple asked Gensha how to enter the Path. Said Gensha, “Do you hear the murmuring of the stream?” “Yes, I do.” “There is a way to enter.”
A Confucian scholar came to Kwaido to ask about Zen. Kwaido answered, “There is a passage in the text you are so thoroughly familiar with, which fitly describes the teaching of Zen. Did not Confucius declare, ‘Do you think I am holding something back from you, Oh my disciples? Indeed, I have held nothing back from you.’” The scholar could not understand this, but later when they were walking together in the mountains they passed a bush of wild laurel. “Do you smell it?” asked Kwaido. When the scholar answered that he did, Kwaido exclaimed, “There, I have kept nothing back from you!”
What are these men trying to convey? Does Kwaido wish to show the scholar that the scent of wild laurel is Tao or Nirvana? Indeed no! If that had been Kwaido’s idea, he would have said it in so many words. He just wanted the scholar to experience the scent of wild laurel. These stories are rather like jokes. The moment you try to explain a joke it falls flat, and you only laugh when you see the point directly. Thus to explain these stories is really to explain them away. Now Zen never explains; it only gives hints, for, as van der Leeuw has said, “The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” Trying to explain Zen is like trying to catch wind in a box; the moment you shut the lid it ceases to be wind and in time becomes stagnant air. For “the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the voice thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. Even so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.”
The Barrier of the Open Road
Some have thought that Zen is just a kind of “naturalism,” and so it would seem to be if we were to take, say, the following from Rinzai at its face value:19
You must not be artful. Be your ordinary self. Seeking in the external world, if you would fain find your hands and feet by inquiring of your neighbors, you are committing an error. If you seek after Buddha, Buddha will turn out to be just a mere name. Rather know him who seeks for Buddha.…You yourself as you are—that is the Buddha Dharma [Law]. I stand or I sit; I array myself or I eat; I sleep when I am fatigued. The ignoramus will deride me but the wise man will understand.…If you master any place where you are, that place becomes true ground.…Therefore the ancients said that if you make an attempt to acquire the law, the law will not operate naturally and all the evil circumstances will push their heads up competitively. When the sword of wisdom comes forth, there will be nothing at all—no enticement of any sort in the world. Then you will see the bright half of darkness in the darkness itself, and will see also the dark half of brightness in brightness itself. Wherefore the ancients said that the everyday mind is the true law. [Trans. Sokei-an Sasaki]