The Way of Zen

Summary

This book by Alan Watts is trying to present Zen Buddhism in a way that it makes sense for the Western Mind. It is a great introduction to the topic and a good starting point for further exploration because Alan Watts has a way of breaking down spiritual topics into understandable pieces, cutting through the mysticism, without losing it.

The main take away for me is that Zen Buddhism has many different aspects and that it is shaped by it's history and the culture that it grew up in. Also there are aspects of it that are self-contradictory. The freeing of the mind from logical shackles while also having traditions of extreme discipline and order with master/student relationships in the monasteries.

Zen is also a philosophy about intuitive understanding, about knowing without knowing how. It's about forms of mastery that transcend the spoken word and the written text, and there is a way of intuitive understanding that is based on in unconscious processing instead of rational thought. And Zen Buddhism tries to tap into this way of understanding with clever koans, riddles and stories that are designed to not be sensible. They are trying to throw off the rational mind to make room for enlightenment, because enlightenment is not something that can be rationally understood.

In this way, Zen is also full of paradoxes, related to it's roots in Taoism and ideas such as that–when we stop searching we find or when we stop traveling we have reached–are very pervasive in Zen.

Detailed Notes

Preface

There is a Parallelism between current western thought and Zen philosophy.

Science is eroding values and laws of reality and our philosophy can't quite grapple with the void that's left.

Book Recommendation: Essays in Zen Buddhism – Suzuki

Book Recommendation: Introduction to Zen Buddhism – Suzuki

Book Recommendation: Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics – R.H. Blyth

Book Recommendation: Spirit of Zen – Alan Watts

Book Recommendation: Zen Buddhism – Christmas Humphrey

The scientifically trained Westerner is, not without reason, a cautious and skeptical fellow who likes to know what he is getting into.

Interpreting between East and West is hard.

Part One - Background and History

One - The Philosophy of the Tao

There is a divide between Western and Eastern thought, a misunderstanding because the basic principles of thought are different between the two cultures.

Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

Western thought divides things into roles and labels. This is a tree, I am a doctor, a brother etc. These conventions designate the boundary of what is knowable. If you can express it in these categories, it can be knowledge. Taoism disagrees.

In the same way we select who we are based on memories from the past. Instead of saying I am what I am Westerners say I am what I was.

And this recollection of memories is formed in abstractions, in words that categorize.

We cut up the world into slices we can comprehend and manipulate but many things in the world don't like to be cut up, they happen interconnected, all at once.

Confucianism is about fitting people into the system as orderly functioning gears, destroying their spontaneity and unpredictability in favor of a working society. Taoism is about regaining that unpredictable spontaneity.

We know how to do certain things, without ever knowing them. We keep breathing, our hearts keep beating. We just do it.

How do we know when we have enough information to stop and simply decide and go do things? We have a hunch, a feeling, a non rational instinct helping us decide.

The Tao spontaneously grows the universe. It can't explain how, yet is very skillful and intuitive about it. It doesn't know and yet does.

Thought: Somehow the argument that just because we don't know how to breath means we don't know is not convincing. I.e. just because something is not in our conscious content as knowledge doesn't mean that it is not understandable at all. Furthermore the cells that implement this type of behaviour could very well be said to "know" in the informational sense of the term. Similar to how Wikipedia knows a lot of things or a book does, yet could not be conscious of it.

It is really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming, in a rather special sense, stupid.

Understanding the Tao is wu-wei - the art of "non-doing". Non thinking.

The ordinary men is one who has to walk by lifting his legs with his hands, the Taoist is one who has learned to let the legs walk by themselves.

Te is the art of using wu-wei, something that can't be learned can't be mastered, when that is the aim, it is spontaneity, virtue, without aim, the mind at ease, doing what it does best, without being constricted and forced into a certain shape by the ego.

Superior work has the quality of an accident.

Mastering te is becoming the source of continuous marvelous accidents, without intending it.

Two - The Origins of Buddhism

Wars of ideas are wars of annihilation. Fanatics of ideas lose humanity in their struggles, compromising everything for their beliefs.

The basic myth of Hinduism is that the world is god playing hide-and-seek with himself.

God is dying to divide and give birth to the world, only for the world to die and reunite slowly to get back to god.

Brahman, much like the Tao, is growing the universe. Not understanding how it's done, not making it, planning it out, knowing what's going on, yet doing it all nonetheless.

Thought: Making and growing get closer together as technology increases. I.e. at some point we might be able to understand growing and all it's complexity and rules and compute what it really means for something to grow, so that the two terms become indistinguishable. I.e. there is a possibility for a sufficiently advanced intellect to understand what growth is, rendering to that intellect "growing" and "making" the same act. The more interesting thing would then be if their is still a "higher level abstraction" such that this intellect could still use intuition and "grow" things even more complex than what it could understand consciously. I.e. some sort of AI that intuitively builds universe altering machines, because that's the sort of thing it does without quite understanding why or how.

Facts and events are terms of measurement rather than realities of nature.

At the same time the division of Brahman into the one vs. the many is an expression of that fact. It's not reality. Brahman is at the same time one and many or neither.

Reality in itself is neither permanent nor impermanent; it can not be categorized.

The ego is an illusion of memory, it's not real, here right now in this moment, this reality. Because there is no division between self and world, they are part of the same thing. Non dual.

Trying to control the ego is an unsolvable paradox. Trying it anyways, to bring the world around under control is frustration and continuous disappointment the cycle of birth and death—samsara.

Life utterly defeats our efforts to control it. [...] all human Striving is no more than a vanishing hand clutching at clouds.

Nirvana is the way of life which ensues when clutching at life has come to an end.

Nirvana can not be reached because it is indefinable. It is that without a definition and because of that infinite. Reaching for nirvana is reaching for something that is not nirvana. It can only be reached accidentally, spontaneously, unconsciously.

Meditation is done sitting because that's a perfectly fine way of doing it. There is no spiritual reason. In absence of a need to go somewhere, sitting is just fine. Meditation ceases to be meditation the moment it's done with a certain goal, a desired effect in mind, at least in the Buddhist sense.

The anxiety-laden problem of what will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand, or where my lap goes when I stand up.

Three - Mahayana Buddhism

Mahayana is about finding a way, recipes, tactics, towards nirvana. There are different traditions within it, focusing on different ways to get there.

To seek nirvana is the folly of looking for what one has never lost.

Book Recommendation: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism – T.R.V. Murti

To seek to become Buddha is go den, that one is already Buddha-and this is the sole basis upon which Buddhahood can be realized!

Logic and meaning, with its inherent duality, is a property of thought and language but not of the actual world.

The world illusion comes out of the Great Void for no reason, purposelessly, and just because there is no necessity for it to do so.

Four - The Rise and Development of Zen

In Zen there is always the feeling that awakening is something quite natural, something startlingly obvious, which may occur at any moment.

Thought: what would it mean for Zen Buddhist ideas if we found out that manipulation of Information is all there is to consciousness? If we could this way prove that consciousness is something that arises out of nature via brains (and potentially other constructs). What would it mean if a brain implant could provide the exact state id enlightenment that Buddhists were seeking?

Truly to know is not to know.

Awakening can be sudden. All at once, instantaneous. This is called satori.

Book Recommendation: Discussion of Essentials – Hsieh Ling Yün

If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid an immense confusion?

The true practice of Zen is no practice, that is the seeming paradox of being a Buddha without intending to be a Buddha.

Expanding an effort towards buddhahood and thinking of awakening as a goal to be reached are wrong. You are already there. All the fancy stuff around it, the scriptures, the monasteries, the strict way of life, it all I'd not necessary even counterproductive to this insight.

Zen once it became popular gained baggage, turning into a school that needs to educate young people, turning away from the focus on awakening and rather also instilling morals and virtues into the young boys they train.

Sitting meditation known as za-zen is a practice only in modern Zen. Old Zen didn't use to do that, sit when you sit, don't sit for attaining Buddhahood.

Part 2 - Principles and Practice

One - Empty and Marvelous

The Conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind.

To eat is to survive to be hungry.

Our egocentric point of view is just one way to see reality. In truth there is no separate thing from our bodies and minds. No I to control those things. The "I" is just as much the existence of the body, as the body is the "I".

I breathe ~ It breathes me.

Decisions happen, there is no "I" that does the deciding. "Us" doing the deciding is a fact bolted on top by our minds after the decision already happened.

There is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

Zen is a disillusionment with the idea of goals, future time, good without bad, and the ego. All of them are concepts of the mind, illusions not to be found in reality which exists somewhere in the middle between their dual concepts. The world vs I, no in between. And so with good and bad, future and past.

Zen is not a system of self improvement. Seeking something = not Zen, you missed the point.

Two - Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing

In walking just walk, in sitting just sit. Above all, don't wobble. – Yün-men

Naturalness can't be planned. Then it's not natural anymore.

You can't split the mind against itself. In trying to control one part with another you lose the naturalness, the whole.

Feedback and self controlling mechanisms share a similarity with the brain and consciousness.

These types of systems can't grow in complexity beyond a certain point because observing the whole complex system before acting would become to slow to be still useful. Also there is a lag between reality and the system adjusting to reality, before the control of the measurement kicks in.

Book Recommendation: Communication: the Social Matrix of Psychiatry – Gregory Bateson

Thinking is a form of acting. When thinking, just think.

Zen has its roots in heavily socialized societies where people follow norms and order diligently. Outside of such a system it might even do harm, dissolving the importance of the little existing structures, being used as a weapon to sow chaos and be "morally right" about it because it's "Zen baby!"

The ego controlling spontaneity itself arises spontaneously. It is impossible not to act spontaneously therefore. The ego vanishes when this is understood.

The meaning of the words doesn't go beyond the words themselves. Suchness, the nature of the universe simply is, lacking description. Zen is pointing to what is.

Thinking and acting, fluently, without hesitation is the way of Zen.

Thought: All of this reminds me very very much of Daniel Kahnemans systems 1 and 2 thinking. Slow and rational vs. fast and intuitive. Zen is about really mastering intuition.

Buddhas still have feelings but they don't get hung up on them. Their mind is not blocked in it's processing by emotions or other thoughts arising. Wu-nien => no second thought.

In Zen there is neither self nor Buddha to which one can cling, no good to gain and no evil to be avoided, no thoughts to be eradicated and no mind to be purified, no body to perish and no soul to be saved. At one blow this entire framework of abstractions is shattered into fragments.

Three - Za-zen and the Loan

Sitting is a way of experiencing the world more clearly. There is nothing to do but sit. So sit. If the sitting has the end of buddhahood in mind, it's not Zen. And one can't fully concentrate on the sitting either. Doing Nothing like this is very hard for people these days since they always want to do something. Constantly running to make the world fit their wants and needs.

If in something so simple and trivial as lighting a cigarette one is fully aware, seeing the flame, the curling smoke, and the regulation of the breath as the most important things in the universe, it will seem to an observer that the action has a ritualistic style.

Four - Zen in the Arts

Hurry and all that it involves, is fatal. For there is no goal to be attained.

Zen art is as much about the things that are there as it is about the stuff that is missing. The empty space, between lines on paper and notes in melody. Knowing when enough is enough.

Lunatics and Zen masters are very similar to each other.

Haikus describe things in their suchness, and use simple language, making them an accessible medium of expression to the non-educated population.

When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present–normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen.

If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea.