Your sword, a lightning-flash,
Cuts like the wind of spring!
Yet another in the same strain runs:
Under the sword raised high
Is hell. In fear your tremble,
But walk on!—
And there is the Land of Bliss.
In Zen we discover the central truth of Oriental wisdom standing naked and unashamed—shorn of its trappings and symbols. At times it seems utterly perplexing and again utterly absurd. But it does not differ from the supreme experience which lies at the heart of every other faith aiming at freedom of the spirit. Yet we are so used to symbols and doctrines, so cluttered up with the mere images of wisdom which the ages have handed down, with the names of the God whose Self remains unseen, that when someone points directly to the experience itself we are taken aback and cannot believe our eyes. This is the more so when that which is pointed out is something lying right under our noses and which ordinarily we are too proud to consider. But God is always found where He is least expected, and no one would have thought of looking for Him in the cowshed of a country inn.
And if Zen reveals to us the central experience of Oriental religion, no one can say that Asia can offer us only the via negativa of denying the world. Eastern philosophy makes an illusion of man and the universe only as a step to making them divine, so that we may see a wonder and a miracle in the drawing of water and the carrying of fuel. For in the doctrine that each creature and thing is a transitory aspect of the eternal Brahman only a benighted mind could read a denial of living forms; yet the intention was to accord them the most tremendous affirmation that man could utter.
7. THE GREAT LIBERATION
Those who search for happiness do not find it because they do not understand that the object of their search is the seeker. We say that they are happy who have “found themselves” for the secret of happiness lies in the ancient saying, “Become what you are.” We must speak in paradox because we think we are divided from life and, to be happy, must unite ourselves with it. But we are already united, and all our doings are its doings. Life lives us; we do not live life. Yet in fact there is no “us” apart from life that life can so “live.” It is not that we are passive tools of life, as fatalists believe, for we could only be passive tools if we were something other than life. When you imagine yourself to be divided from and at war with life, you imagine yourself to be its passive tool and so are unhappy, feeling with Omar Khayyám—
Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And who with Eden didst devize the Snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d, Man’s Forgiveness give—and take!
But in truth action and passivity are one and the same act, and life and yourself are one and the same being. This truth of ancient philosophy is beyond our logic, but he who understands it is a sage and he who does not is a fool. But, curiously enough, the fool becomes a sage by letting himself be free to be a fool; then his joy knows no bounds and he “walks freely throughout the universe.” One might call this the complexity of the very simple. And this, without the use of technical terms, is the answer of Oriental wisdom to the toughest problem of Western thought—the problem of fate and free will.
Fate and Free Will
Inevitably, the search for spiritual freedom brings us to this time-honored conundrum. For, it will be asked, is not the total acceptance of life as we have described it simply the most thoroughgoing fatalism? Does it not mean just the huge sense of irresponsibility which arises from the knowledge that not only your deeds and circumstances, but also your very thoughts and feelings, are the acts of life or fate—and you may as well cease to be worried by them? If this is true, does it not also imply that those who persist in the apparent bondage and very real misery of refusal to accept, believing in free will and taking pride in their egoistic powers, are in fact unable to experience that acceptance, fate having decreed their belief in free will? When Oriental philosophy says that all things are Brahman, Western intellectualism cannot resist applying the label of fatalism. The reason is that we have not been able to resolve the problem of the vicious circle, for determinism or fatalism is its philosophic description. The vicious circle is the impotence of man; it is not resolved until the realization of our impotence as men can be complemented by our omnipotence as God. This is the point where fatalism bursts into freedom. Curiously enough, few philosophers have ever dared to be consistent fatalists because the doctrine contains an odd paradox. Fatalism is the doctrine of man’s utter subservience to destiny, but one strange objection is always raised to it—“If everyone believed that all their thoughts and deeds were inevitably foreordained by fate, then people would behave just exactly as they pleased.” In other words, they would become dangerously free!
Total acceptance as we have described it is very nearly this carrying of fatalism to the point where it becomes absolute liberty. But it contains an additional factor which guards the process against its dangers and makes it something much more than a mere proposition in philosophy. But first we must consider the problem of fatalism in its purely philosophical sense. Logically, the position of the fatalists is unassailable; they reason that a given cause can have only one effect and that there can be no activity of the human mind which is not the effect of a cause. Thus whenever a choice of actions is presented to us, our decision is determined not by a free act of will but by the untold number of factors which make up our being at that moment—hereditary impulses, instinctive reflexes, moral upbringing, and a thousand other tendencies which incline us to a particular choice as inevitably as a magnet draws a needle lying within its field. An act of choice could not be free unless it were done without motive, for our motives are the result of past conditioning. But motive is only another name for cause, and an action without any kind of cause is impossible. Thus we have a chain of cause and effect, in which each cause is an effect and each effect a cause; each link in this chain can only have two particular links on either side of it, before as cause and after as effect. Therefore the last link in the chain is predetermined by the first.
With Earth’s first Clay They did the Last Man’s knead,
And then of the Last Harvest sow’d the Seed:
Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.
The Freedom of Fate
Yet, strictly speaking, this amounts in the end to a proof of free will, but a more tremendous free will than the advocates of that doctrine ever contemplated. For if each one of our acts is determined by the entire previous history of the universe, if sun, moon, planets, and stars are at work in the winking of an eyelid, this means that we in our turn are using their power in all our doings. For the doctrine of fatalism, from one point of view, amounts almost to God’s giving man carte blanche to use His power in whatever way He pleases. Objectively it may be true that in a determined universe fatalism gives you anything but the power to do as you please, but purely objective matters have little or no direct meaning for human beings when it comes to the really important things of life, and it is a truism that cold facts have no meaning apart from that which we give to them. As a rule, fatalists are those who try to understand life in terms of strictly rational and objective values. (“Objective values” have probably as much reality as cubic colors.) But if determinism is a cold fact its meaning depends entirely on the subjective attitude we take toward it, and it is seldom that the rationalist has either the courage to accept its power to liberate or sufficiently abject pessimism to take the other attitude and say with Andreyev