The Meaning of Happiness

6. THE ONE IN THE MANY

Although that freedom of the spirit which is known through the total acceptance of life and of oneself can never be contained in any form of words and ideas, it is most clearly expressed in the ancient wisdom of Asia. In Hindu Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoism we find a view of life which comes as near as anything to a description of that inner experience which reveals, as the Japanese Buddhist Hakuin wrote, that

This very earth is the Lotus Land of Purity,

And this very body is the body of Buddha.

The approach to this understanding began independently in both India and China; after a period of centuries the two streams merged and, to my own mind, achieved their fulfillment in China some twelve hundred years ago. In studying this wisdom it is important to follow its historical development, both to grasp the continuity of experience and to see how close a resemblance there is between the growth in history and the growth of that same experience in the mind of the individual. Bear always in mind that the doctrines of these ancient religions are the symbols of inward, personal experiences rather than attempts to describe metaphysical truth. The important thing is not whether the doctrine contains an objective statement of fact about the universe; it is to discover what inward experience, what state of mind or attitude to life would lead human beings to think in that way. For the wisdom of the East has a strictly practical aim which is not mere knowledge about the universe; it aims at a transformation of the individual and of his feeling for life through experience rather than belief. This experience is psychological or spiritual, not metaphysical, and except in certain specialized fields has no relation to occultism or to what we understand in the West as philosophy. (See above, ch. 2, pp. 46–48 and ch. 3, pp. 86–88.)

Vedanta and the Upanishads

Some eight hundred years before the birth of Christ the sages of India began to instruct their disciples with a number of collected sayings and parables known as the Upanishads. No one knows who first uttered them, though from time to time some of them are attributed to Yajnavalkya, of whom Geden writes, “If the name represents a real individuality, and is not merely a title under whose shelter many convergent thoughts and reasonings have found expression, Yajnavalkya may claim a place with the greatest thinkers of the world or of any age.” The Upanishads are the foundation of what was subsequently known as Vedanta, which is to say the “end” or fulfillment of the Vedas, the Vedas being the earliest of all Hindu scriptures. With matchless economy and beauty of language the Upanishads speak in a number of different ways of Brahman, the One Reality which is expressed in all the manifold forms, objects, activities, and living beings of the universe. Thus it is said in the Katha Upanishad:¹

As the wind, though one, takes on new forms in whatever it enters; the Spirit, though one, takes new forms in whatever that lives. He is within all, and is also outside.…There is one Ruler, the Spirit that is in all things, who transforms His one form into many. Only the wise who see Him in their souls attain the joy eternal.

And again:

From His life comes the universe, and in His life the universe moves. In His majesty is the terror of thunder. Those who know this attain immortality. From fear of Him fire burns and from fear of Him the sun shines. From fear of Him the clouds and winds, and death itself, move on their way.

And in the Mundaka Upanishad:

From Him comes all life and mind and the senses of all life. From Him comes space and light, air and fire and water, and this earth that holds us all.…From Him comes the sun, and the source of all fire is the sun. From him comes the moon, and from this comes the rain and all herbs that grow upon earth. And man comes from Him, and man unto woman gives seed: and thus an infinity of beings comes from the Spirit supreme.

But what is the exact relation between Brahman and His creatures? Is it the same relation of Creator to creature that we find in the Christian and Islamic conceptions, or is it the pantheistic relation of participation, in which the creature is a part of God, where God is one with the universe? The answer is given in the Chandogya Upanishad:

All this universe is in truth Brahman. He is the beginning and end and life of all. As such, in silence, give unto Him adoration.…There is a Spirit that is mind and life, light and truth and vast spaces. He contains all works and desires and all perfumes and all tastes. He enfolds the whole universe, and in silence is loving to all. This is the Spirit that is in my heart, smaller than a grain of rice, or a grain of barley, or a grain of mustard-seed.…This is the Spirit that is in my heart, greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than heaven itself, greater than all these worlds.

At first it sounds almost like pure pantheism, but later in the same Upanishad the master says, “An invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit of the whole universe. That is Reality. That is Truth. Thou art That.” The master does not tell his disciple that he is a part of Brahman; he tells him that he is Brahman, and if we are to give this doctrine a label we must say that it is not pantheism but panentheism.² In the same way St. Catherine of Genoa says, “My me is God, nor do I know my selfhood save in Him,” and again, “My Being is God, not by simple participation, but by a true transformation of my Being.”³

Therefore the phrase “That art thou” (tat tvam asi) is the first, fundamental principle of Vedanta arising from the second, that all things without exception are Brahman, not by participation, for Brahman is one and indivisible. Hence Vedanta is also known as the system of Advaita (literally, “not two”) or nonduality, and nonduality in philosophy is the natural expression of total acceptance in psychology. Every object, being, and activity is Brahman in His (or Its) entirety, for Brahman alone is—the “One-without-a-second.” But, it will be asked, if Brahman is the only reality, why do things appear to be separate, why do we human beings feel that we are separate egos and how is it that we are ignorant of our identity with Brahman? This, according to Vedanta, is maya—a word grossly misunderstood by most Western interpreters of Hindu thought, who translate it simply as “illusion.” As we have already shown, the original meaning of maya was “trick” or “device,” and it is sometimes described as the creative power of Brahman. Woodroffe describes it thus in his Shakti and Shakta:⁴

Maya is not rightly rendered Illusion. In the first place it is conceived as a real Power of Being and as such is one with Full Reality. The Full, free of all illusion, experiences the engendering of the finite centers and the centers themselves in and as Its own changeless partless Self.…Even God cannot have man’s mode of knowledge and enjoyment without becoming man. He by and as His Power does become man and yet remains Himself. Man is Power in limited form as Avidya [ignorance]. The Lord is unlimited Power as Maya. [p. 44]

In other words, if man has the experience of separateness, this experience also is Brahman since there is nothing other than Brahman. Maya is not illusion as against reality, for in the Vedantist conception there is nothing apart from Reality which may be set over against it. Thus we may say that while there is no actual separateness from Brahman, there is certainly an experience of separateness, and this experience is real even though it is incomplete and relative. Maya is therefore only translatable as “illusion” in regard to the actual existence of separateness from Brahman; but as the experience of separateness maya is creative power, for that experience is the device whereby Brahman manifests Himself as creatures who act on their own initiative.

But does this imply that though we may have a real experience, say, of a tree and a mountain as separate things, those two are not there at all, that while the experience may be real it has no real object to be known as a tree and a mountain? Is our imagination simply conjuring up these forms by Brahman’s power out of a vast and formless infinitude of sameness and uniformity? Do the Vedantins imply that when we have ascended from the partial experience of maya to the total experience of Brahman, we are conscious only of this infinite oneness and have no longer any perception of trees and mountains? Although many texts would seem to answer these questions in the affirmative, I cannot see that this is a true interpretation of the Upanishads or of the fundamental principle of nonduality. For it is not at all consistent with that principle to identify Brahman with infinite unity as distinct from finite diversity, with formlessness as distinct from form. If Brahman is truly nondual, He cannot be the infinite as opposed to the finite. But when we say that a man, a mountain, or a tree is Brahman, we are not denying that it is a man, a mountain, or a tree. Conversely, if such objects are real, this does not involve their separateness from Brahman and in no way denies the statement that Brahman is the only reality. If by saying that man is Brahman we imply that he is not man, we fall straight into dualism because we are virtually saying that Brahman is not man! If this interpretation is incorrect, I err in good company, for, to quote Woodroffe again,

the Vishvasara Tantra says: “What is here, is elsewhere. What is not here, is nowhere.” The unseen is the seen, which is not some alien disguise behind which it lurks. Experience of the seen is the experience of the unseen in time and space. The life of the individual is an expression of the same laws which govern the universe. Thus the Hindu knows, from his own daily rest, that the Power which projects the universe rests. His dreamless slumber when only Bliss is known, tells him, in some fashion, of the causal state of universal rest. From the mode of his awakening and other psychological processes he divines the nature of creative thinking. [Ibid., p. 36]

The state of infinite formlessness only describes Brahman in His condition of rest (pralaya), and it does not follow from this that the enlightened sage, while living in this world, sees all the forms of life as a vain, empty illusion drifting like insubstantial smoke across the face of a void. Such world-denying philosophy does not represent the true meaning of Vedanta, for it is said in the Isa Upanishad:

In darkness are they who worship only the world, but in greater darkness they who worship the infinite alone. He who accepts both saves himself from death by knowledge of the former and attains immortality by the knowledge of the latter.

So much for the doctrine. We now have to see into the state of mind which underlies it, described in the Mandukya Upanishad as

that which is not conscious of the subjective, nor that which is conscious of the objective nor that which is conscious of both, nor that which is simple consciousness, nor that which is a mass all sentiency, nor that which is all darkness. It is unseen, transcendent, unapprehensible, uninferable, unthinkable, indescribable, the sole essence of the consciousness of self, the negative of all illusion, the ever peaceful, all bliss, the One Unit;—this indeed is atman [the Self], it should be known. [Trans. M. N. Dvivedi]

One has to be careful of these negative descriptions which so delight the Hindu mind and remember the Chinese saying that “between the All and the Void is only a difference of name.”⁵ For on the one hand the Upanishads say that Brahman is all, while on the other they apply the technique of “neti, neti”—“not this, not this”—to show that no individual thing is, as such, a sufficient description of Brahman. Therefore it cannot be said that the knowledge of Brahman is consciousness of the subjective, because this at once excludes consciousness of the objective and all other states of consciousness as well. In regard to these states Brahman is each and all, but none to the exclusion of others. In terms of psychology this is the complete acceptance of all possible states of mind and of all possible circumstances, for to say that all things are Brahman is another way of saying that all things are to be accepted—even nonacceptance, we must add if our nondualism is to be thorough.

Thus there is nothing man can do to attain union with Brahman, for whether his state of mind is vidya (enlightenment) or avidya (ignorance) it is nevertheless Brahman. Any attempt to gain that union by doing, by making changes, is egoistic pride, being man’s attempt to achieve by his own power what already is by the power of Brahman. Such pride, to use a popular phrase, is only man’s own funeral; it does not affect Brahman. In this very moment all men are Brahman in spite of and because of themselves, and by no possible means can they make or break that union; man can only become conscious of it, not as metaphysical truth but as spiritual freedom, by seeing his own nature as it is and relaxing that contraction (sankocha) of egoistic pride which will not let his nature be as it is, and which is forever trying to get away from it by making a virtue of acceptance. Deliverance (kaivalya) or freedom is not the result of any course of action, whether mental or physical or moral; according to Vedanta it comes only by Knowledge in the special sense of gnana (Gk. γνωδις) as the fruit of “meditation,” which is being rather than doing.⁶

The Hindu mind was ever in search of “that One thing, knowing which, we shall know all.” Obviously, knowledge in this sense is not just factual information; the phrase is another way of saying that the whole cannot be known by the sum of its parts. Thus to know all is not to know about everything, for, as Woodroffe explains, it is not an experience of the whole but the experience whole.⁷ This becomes clearer when we understand the reasons for which the experience was originally sought. Our ordinary, partial experience is always limited: joy is conditioned by sorrow, pleasure by pain, life by death, and knowledge by ignorance. Therefore the Hindus conceived freedom as an experience which had no conditioning opposite and called it union with Brahman, the “One-without-a-second.” For man is always bound so long as he depends for his happiness on a partial experience; joy must always give way to sorrow, otherwise it can never be known as joy. But the “experience whole” has no opposite; all the pairs of opposites exist in it, and therefore it may be described as the total acceptance of experience as we know it now, at this and at every moment. There is no greater freedom than the freedom to be what you are now. To this experience of freedom the doctrine of Brahman is a key for those who have the wits to use it, for the East does not give out its wisdom in plain statements for all and sundry to use or abuse as they please. It gives hints and makes everyone work hard to unravel their meaning on the principle of “cast not your pearls before swine.”

Early Buddhism

But inevitably there came a time when the experience was obscured by the doctrine, when the psychology of religion became the philosophy of religion and the Brahmanic tradition degenerated into scholasticism, ceremonialism, and fantastic extremes of asceticism whose object was not to accept the opposites but to destroy them, so negatively was the doctrine interpreted. In the depths of this degeneration there appeared in India one Gautama Siddhartha, a prince of the Sakya clan, afterward known as the Buddha, which is perhaps the most tremendous title that a son of India could be given. According to the tradition, Buddhas arise in the human race about once in every five thousand years at times when the “True Law” is forgotten among men. The word “Buddha” is derived from the root budh—“to know,” and a Buddha is thus one who is supremely enlightened or awakened, one who has plumbed the uttermost mysteries of the universe and attained all knowledge, one who, out of his time, has reached the full height of human evolution. No one can tell whether Gautama was actually such a being, for the imaginative mind of the Orient has undoubtedly added much legend to fact, and it cannot be said that such a giddy height of attainment is the immediate object of subsequent Buddhist thought and practice. As we shall see, in China at least the word “Buddha” has been understood in a more immediately practical sense, although the deepest reverence is still accorded to the supreme Buddhas, to Gautama, Amitabha, and the various Dhyani Buddhas of Mahayanist theology.

Although we have in writing a prodigious number of words attributed to the Buddha, little is known of him. For a long time after his death (circa 550 BC) his words were passed from mouth to mouth and learned by rote—hence their tabulated mnemonic form—and when they were finally set down in writing their style bore little relation to the spoken words of any human being that ever lived. The earliest records of his teaching are found in the Pali Canon, three large groups of scriptures which read, for a great part, like a statistical report compiled on wet afternoons by monks who had nothing better to do. Another considerable section (the Vinaya) contains the very elaborate system of rules and regulations for the conduct of the monastic order (sangha), most of which were probably invented in later times and ascribed to the Buddha to give them the necessary sanction. Again they are obviously the work of those whose time was so slightly filled that they could devote hours and hours to the invention of pettifogging restrictions. As for the sections on psychology, never were there such ponderous lists of minutiae, the apparent aim of which is to analyze the human being down to the last detail and so prove that he does not really exist. One has every sympathy with the Chinese Buddhist master who described these records as “lists of ghosts and sheets of paper fit only to wipe the dirt from your skin.” The actual, positive teaching has the same tendency to repetitiveness and decomposition, having the general aspect of a flat, barren plain without any definite mountains or valleys; it just goes on and on. It seems nothing less than a miracle that a great world religion can have grown on such a foundation, but I do not think it did.

Here and there we find oases in this desert of words—passages of the same profound beauty which graces the Upanishads and of a somewhat similar meaning. These will be found principally in a collection of sayings known as the Dhammapada (of which I recommend the translation by Mrs. C. A. F. Rhys Davids).⁸ They are found, too, in some of the Dialogues and in other isolated sections of the Canon, and they stand out in such contrast to the rest that they are immediately recognizable as the words of a truly great mind. Therefore to arrive at some idea of the Buddha’s teaching we have to take such passages and consider them in their historical context, in relation to what came before them and to what developed out of them. We must remember that the Buddha was active at a time when Hinduism was in a decline, when spiritual experience had been forgotten in its symbols. Except in some few instances his own teaching was swept away in this decline and became so devitalized that it ultimately died out in the land of its birth. But for some hundreds of years a truly vital tradition lived on in India, drawing to it some of the best minds then existing among the Brahmins. This tradition finally came north to China, Tibet, and Japan, and in China Buddhism achieved its full glory in the blending of Indian profundity with the Chinese senses of reality, beauty, and humor.

The Buddhism of Gautama

The Buddha’s teaching is unique in its utter lack of theology; it concentrates wholly on the necessity of arriving at a personal, immediate experience and dispenses with the doctrinal symbol of that experience. In this respect it is the only truly psychological religion. It is a mistake to say that the Buddha denied the existence of any kind of God or soul; these were subjects he simply refused to discuss on the grounds that mere talking and mere belief were not conducive to enlightenment. “One thing do I teach,” he said. “Dukkha and deliverance from dukkha.” It is usually translated “suffering and deliverance from suffering,” but for us the word “suffering” is rather too sweeping. I prefer the translation “discord” or even “unhappiness.” According to him the cause of discord or unhappiness was tanha or selfish craving, which is perhaps best understood as refusal to accept the “three signs of being.” These are:

1.Anicca—Change or Impermanence.

2.Anatta—Literally, “No-self.” The unreality of the ego as a permanent, self-contained, and self-directing unit.

3.Dukkha—In this context, suffering in its widest sense.

Many people have thought that in making anatta one of the three signs of being the Buddha denied absolutely the existence of any eternal principle in man whatsoever. Actually he denied nothing more than the self-existence of the ego (see above, ch. 1, p. 25), and although as a general rule he refused to discuss the existence of a “Higher Self” (which would be identical with Brahman) there is no doubt that he had it in mind, for he refers directly to it in several places.⁹

When these three signs of being are fully accepted, man attains the experience of Nirvana, whose literal meaning is the dying out of the fire of tanha. In order that no one should confuse doctrine with experience he only described Nirvana negatively and would say nothing positive about it at all. Nirvana, resulting from the acceptance of the three signs of being, is deliverance from sangsara, the “Wheel of Birth and Death”—a general symbol of limited experience, of the bondage of the spirit in the wheel of opposites where all that we like is conditioned by what we dislike. Figuratively (and perhaps actually; we do not know) Nirvana is understood as deliverance from the necessity of being reborn again and again in this world of sangsara. For sangsara is just like what we have called the vicious circle—a circle which turns on and on as long as we try to grapple with the opposites in their own terms, as long as we set pleasure against pain, life against death, permanence against change, and acceptance against escape. The “Wheel of Birth and Death” is indeed the squirrel cage of man’s unhappiness, pursuing himself in order to escape from himself. It is like a bar revolving on its center; the more you push against one end of it, the more it revolves.

Total acceptance of the three signs of being culminates and fulfills itself in the experience of enlightenment or awakening (bodhi), which is the abrupt transition from the dual to the nondual view of life, for Nirvana is sometimes described by the same negative method as employed by the Vedantins in regard to Brahman (cf. the passage quoted on pp. 153–54 from the Mandukya Upanishad). Thus in the Pali Canon alone there is an abundance of evidence to show that Nirvana indicates the same experience of nonduality; a somewhat neglected passage from the Canon puts this beyond all doubt, for Gautama says:¹⁰

Thus the Tathagata [Buddha] knows the straight path that leads to a union with Brahma. He knows it as one who has entered the world of Brahma and has been born in it. There can be no doubt in him.

This is one of a few hints that the Buddha’s view of life went far deeper than many of his disciples admit. For, after his death, his followers began to separate into two great divisions known subsequently as the Mahayana (Great Vehicle) and Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle). It was as if the seed planted by the Buddha had sprouted into two stems, of which one continued to grow while the other withered. For the Hinayana (now confined to Ceylon [Sri Lanka], Burma [Myanmar], and Siam [Thailand]) stuck to the letter of the Pali Canon, “working upon it,” to borrow an appropriate sentence from Bacon, “as the spider worketh its web, bringing forth cobwebs of learning, admirable for its fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.” In their hands the Buddha’s teaching decomposed just as their psychology decomposed man and the universe, proving the nonexistence of all things.

Mahayana Buddhism

But the Mahayana began where the Buddha left off—if indeed there is no truth in the claim that Mahayana is the Buddha’s esoteric teaching. It explored further into the psychology of enlightenment, the nature of Nirvana and sangsara, and the spiritual ideals of Buddhism. One tradition claims that the secret of enlightenment was passed, by a direct mystical communication, down the Mahayana line from patriarch to patriarch of the order.¹¹ Yet although Mahayana by no means escaped the scholasticism of the Hindu mind, and although, contrary to the Buddha’s own practice, it indulged in some of the most subtle metaphysical speculations that man has produced, it established a number of principles which have formed the basis for the greatest spiritual achievements of Buddhism.

The Hinayanists looked upon Nirvana as an escape from the pains of life and death—a conception which to the Mahayanists with their Brahmanic background appeared as the old error of dualism. Thus the ideal man of the Hinayana was the Arhat—one who simply attained Nirvana and ceased from rebirth, entering into the formless rest, bliss, and impersonality of the eternal. But the Mahayanists gave their philosophy of nonduality practical expression in the ideal of the Bodhisattva, who attains liberation but remains in the world of birth and death to assist all other beings to enlightenment. In other words, they refused to make any absolute distinction between Nirvana and sangsara; the two states are the same, seen, as it were, from different points of view. Therefore the great Lankavatara Sutra says:¹²

False imagination teaches that such things as light and shade, long and short, black and white are different and are to be discriminated; but they are not independent of each other; they are only different aspects of the same thing, they are terms of relation, not of reality. Conditions of existence are not of a mutually exclusive character; in essence things are not two but one. Even Nirvana and Samsara’s [sangsara] world of life and death are aspects of the same thing, for there is no Nirvana except where is Samsara, and no Samsara except where is Nirvana. All duality is falsely imagined. [Trans. D. T. Suzuki]

In terms of practical psychology this means that there is no actual distinction between our ordinary, everyday experience and the experience of Nirvana or spiritual freedom. But for some people this experience is binding and for others liberating, and the problem is to achieve what the Lankavatara calls that “turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness” which effects the transformation.

Now the Mahayana was more thoroughgoing in its statement of this problem than even Vedanta. For what is our ordinary, everyday experience? It is not just our awareness of external circumstances or even such ordinary activities as walking, eating, sleeping, breathing, and speaking; it includes also our thinking and feeling—our ideas, moods, desires, passions, and fears. In its most concrete form ordinary, everyday experience is just how you feel at this moment. In a certain sense Buddhism is very much a philosophy and a psychology of the moment, for if we are asked what life is, and if our answer is to be a practical demonstration and not a theory, we can do no better than point to the moment—now! It is in the moment that we find reality and freedom, for acceptance of life is acceptance of the present moment now and at all times. This is not to give the impression that the psychological process is a succession of lightning-quick acts of acceptance, as if they were hurried jabs with a sword that have to be thrust home before the enemy of “making a virtue of acceptance” has spoiled things by carrying us once again into the vicious circle. Acceptance of the moment is allowing the moment to live, which, indeed, is another way of saying that it is to allow life to live, to be what it is now (yathabhutam). Thus to allow this moment of experience and all that it contains freedom to be as it is, to come in its own time and to go in its own time, this is to allow the moment, which is what we are now, to set us free; it is to realize that life, as expressed in the moment, has always been setting us free from the very beginning, whereas we have chosen to ignore it and tried to achieve that freedom by ourselves.

For this reason Mahayana Buddhism teaches that Nirvana or enlightenment cannot really be attained, because the moment we try to attain it by our own power we are using it as an escape from what is now, and we are also forgetting that Nirvana is unattainable in the sense that it already is. To quote the Lankavatara Sutra:¹³

Those who are suffering or who fear suffering, think of Nirvana as an escape and a recompense. They imagine that Nirvana consists in the future annihilation of the senses and the sense-minds; they are not aware that…this life-and-death world and Nirvana are not to be separated.

And again:

Some day each and every one will be influenced by the wisdom and love of the Tathagatas of Transformation [Buddhas appearing in the world] to lay up a stock of merit and ascend the stages [of spiritual achievement]. But, if they only realized it, they are already in the Tathagata’s Nirvana, for, in Noble Wisdom [arya-prajna], all things are in Nirvana from the beginning.

Indeed, from beginningless time, Nirvana has been achieved for us and we have only to accept or realize it. It is much the same, psychologically speaking, as the Grace of God in Christianity, but because of our pride we will not recognize it in our experience of this moment and so do not allow ourselves to be free. In the words which Edwin Arnold put into the Buddha’s mouth

Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels

None other holds you that ye live and die,

And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss

Its spokes of agony,

Its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness.

Therefore to those who, in this pride, are trying to use enlightenment as an escape from themselves the Mahayana says:

When people attain Enlightenment but still continue to cherish the notion of Enlightenment, it means that Enlightenment itself has become an obstructing delusion; therefore, people should follow the path to Enlightenment until in their thoughts worldly passions and Enlightenment become one thing.

And again in the Saptasatika:¹⁴

Bodhi [Enlightenment] is the five offences, and the five offences are Bodhi.…If there is one who regards Bodhi as something attainable, something in which discipline is possible, that one commits self-arrogance.

From one point of view this is dangerous wisdom. There is no better antidote to spiritual pride, but, on the other hand, it might be used as an excuse for any amount of licentiousness. In Buddhism, wisdom is power and sometimes its symbol is a thunderbolt (dorje)—a gigantic force that may be used for good or ill. For reasons that will shortly appear, I do not feel that it is a force for ill when rightly understood, but Buddhism took no chances and never neglected to keep in the forefront the Buddha’s moral precepts. By themselves these precepts and their observance do not produce that wisdom. But they prepare the ground for it and make man safe for it, disciplining him so that he acquires a taste for morality and becomes less and less likely to use the power of wisdom against his own interests and those of human society. The monastic moral code of Buddhism is perhaps stricter than that of any other religion, and though this code becomes absurd when the secret of that wisdom has been lost, it is tremendously important when the real thing flourishes. Some of us wish that the West would put the same restrictions on the use of the physical powers of science. Sometimes I believe that the Mahayana scriptures were made long and difficult reading so that lazy monks who might try to abuse them would go to sleep in their studies. Even so, there is no doubt that the Hindu mind found a glorious opportunity for subtle hairsplitting in setting out the fine distinctions between Nirvana and sangsara, enlightenment and ignorance, for the Mahayana scriptures form the largest bible in the world. The whole Mahayana Canon comprises some sixteen hundred works, some of the longer ones, of which there are an appreciable number, running into as many as a hundred and twenty volumes! Even so, we are told that certain parts of it have been lost.

Taoism and the I Ching

In form rather than content the native Chinese religion of Taoism presents a refreshing contrast. It has only four important scriptures, all of which are eminently readable, straightforward, and brief; these are the works of Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, and Huai-nan Tzu. Its basic principles, however, are so close to those of Buddhism that the two faiths often became blended and were able to improve one another in many ways, especially as to form and method. According to tradition Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, was a contemporary of the Buddha and also of Confucius.¹⁵ Although some, after a modern fashion, have denied his existence the story persists that Lao Tzu was a court librarian who, before departing to the western mountains to end his days in retirement, left behind the short collection of sayings known as the Tao Te Ching. Chuang Tzu lived some four hundred years later and stands in somewhat the same relation to Lao Tzu as St. Paul to Jesus Christ; his writings are longer and in some ways more developed than Lao Tzu’s, one of their chief features being a large supply of anecdotes and parables which are an unending feast of wisdom and humor.

Taoism is based on three fundamental principles, known respectively as Tao, Te, and Wu-wei. Many attempts have been made to translate the word “Tao”—the Way, Reason, God, Law, the Logos, Nature, Life, and Meaning. Jung, who worked with the German Orientalist Wilhelm, has called it the principle of synchronicity and has also made it mean “personality” in a special sense of the word.¹⁶ All these terms, however, only give certain aspects of the meaning of Tao, and I prefer to follow the example of those Orientalists who have left it untranslated. The idea of Tao is found in Chinese thought long before the time of Lao Tzu; originally it meant “speech” and thus the Tao Te Ching appropriately opens with the pun, “The Tao that can be tao-ed is not Tao,” or, as Ch’u Ta-kao renders it, “The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao.” In the I Ching or Book of Changes the “synchronistic” aspect of Tao is uppermost, and this little-understood work must be given some consideration because many authorities hold, and I believe rightly, that the I Ching is almost the foundation of Chinese thought. To my own knowledge the word does not occur philosophically in the actual text of the I Ching; but it is found in the appendices, of later date, and there is no doubt at all that the Chinese concept of Tao has been greatly influenced by the I Ching. Moreover, the “synchronistic” aspect of Tao has contributed largely to the Buddhist psychology of the moment.

The I Ching is probably the second earliest of the great Chinese classics, and according to Legge was written in 1143 BC or thereabouts. It is generally used as a book of divination, but probably has much profounder uses. “If some years were added to my life,” said Confucius, “I would give fifty to the study of the I, and might then escape falling into great errors.”¹⁷ The actual text is an analysis of sixty-four hexagrams made up of eight trigrams, sets of divided and undivided lines corresponding to the eight principal factors or elements of life. One of these hexagrams (made up of two of the trigrams) is said to show the two main factors involved in any situation at a particular moment. The divided lines show the principle of yin (negative and female) and the undivided lines that of yang (positive and male), the two aspects under which Tao operates in the world of form. (See diagram.) The I Ching and the system of divination based upon it has, I believe, puzzled so many Westerners because it presupposes a view of life and a way of reasoning which are quite foreign to us. This is what Jung terms the principle of synchronicity.

All our reasoning is based on the law of cause and effect operating as a sequence. Something is happening now because something else happened then. But the Chinese do not reason so much along this horizontal line from past, through present to future; they reason perpendicularly, from what is in one place now to what is in another place now. In other words, they do not ask why, or from what past causes, a certain set of things is happening now; they ask, “What is the meaning of those things happening together at this moment?” The word “Tao” is the answer to this question. The present situation within and around oneself is Tao, for the present moment is life. Our memory of the past is contained in it as well as the potentiality of the future. In short, this way of looking at things is based on a great appreciation of the significance of the moment, and implies that all things happening now have a definite relation to one another just because they have occurred together in time, if for no other reason. This is another way of saying that there is a harmony called Tao which blends all events in each moment of the universe into a perfect chord. The whole situation in and around you at this instant is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are to be in accord with Tao. When you have discovered your own union with it, you will be in the state of Te, sometimes rendered as “virtue” or “grace” or “power,” but best understood as Tao realized in man. Of this Lao Tzu says in his laconic style, “High Te is not Te and thus has Te; low Te does not lose Te and thus is not Te,” which Ch’u Ta-kao renders, “The superior virtue is not conscious of itself as virtue; therefore it has virtue. The inferior virtue never lets off virtue; therefore it has no virtue.”

Tao and Te are best understood by considering the principle which joins them, which makes Tao appear in man as Te. This is wu-wei, the secret of harmony with Tao in its spiritual aspect. Other and slightly different orders of wu-wei give harmony with the Tao in its material aspects, and it is with these that the I Ching is primarily concerned—with the conduct of everyday affairs, politics, strategy, economics. For while the I Ching explores the mechanics, the parts and the detailed relationships of the momentary harmony, the purpose of Taoist psychology is to feel it as a whole; the former is analytic and the latter synthetic. Literally wu-wei means “nondoing” or “nonassertion” and is often mistranslated as “doing nothing.” But wu-wei means “nondoing” simply in the sense that by no action of our own can we bring ourselves into harmony with Tao, for, as we have seen, the secret of this harmony in the moment is not action but acceptance of a harmony already achieved by Tao itself. We do not alter the actual situation; but our attitude toward it undergoes a change whereby we feel harmony where before we felt discord. This change Chuang Tzu illustrates by the story of “Three in the Morning.”¹⁸

A keeper of monkeys said with regard to their rations of chestnuts, that each monkey was to have three in the morning and four at night. But at this the monkeys were very angry, so the keeper said that they might have four in the morning and three at night, with which arrangement they were all well pleased. The actual number of the chestnuts remained the same, but there was an adaptation to the likes and dislikes of those concerned. [Trans. Giles]

Wu-wei as acceptance indicates that the only difficulty of Taoism is its unheard-of simplicity. Thus Lao Tzu says:

My words are very easy to know, and very easy to practice.

Yet all men in the world do not know them, nor do they practice them.

The reason for this simplicity is given in the third appendix of the I Ching. In the fifth chapter Legge’s translation reads:

The successive movement of the inactive [yin] and active [yang] operations constitutes what is called the course of things [Tao]. That which ensues as a result of their movement is goodness; that which shows it in its completeness is the natures of men and things. The benevolent see it and call it benevolence. The wise see it and call it wisdom. The common people, acting daily according to it, yet have no knowledge of it. Thus it is that the course of things, as seen by the superior man, is seen by few. [The italics are mine.]

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]

In one sense this may be naturalism, but no one was ever natural who tried to be natural nor even anyone who tried not to try. As soon as we set up a technique of trying, we miss Rinzai’s meaning, for Zen is no sort of cult or “ism,” and the moment we make it into one we fall straight into the vicious circle. But Rinzai’s meaning is “clear as the vastness of the sky,” though to see it we have to see it directly, as if it were a joke. Again and again he admonishes his disciples to see themselves as they are at this moment, for “what you are making use of at this moment, is just what makes a Buddha.”

More than the old Mahayana, more even than Taoism, Zen concentrates on the importance of seeing into one’s own nature now at this moment—not in five minutes when you have had time to “accept” yourself, nor ten years ahead when you have had time to retire to the mountains and meditate. The Zen masters resort to every possible means to direct your attention to yourself, your experience, your state of consciousness as it is now, for, as we have said before, there is no greater freedom than freedom to be what you are now. In our pride we are loath to accept freedom from an experience so apparently humble and prosaic. But there is another factor in the Zen realization. For as soon as you allow yourself that freedom, you realize that, after all, it is not a question of allowing; you see that there was never a time when you did not have that freedom. When understood, the full acceptance of what you are now, of your present state of mind, whatever its nature, shows you that you have been making that full acceptance all along, though you never knew it; it shows you that whatever your experience may have been in the past and whatever it will be in the future, nothing in yourself or in the whole universe has deprived or can ever deprive you of that freedom. Before this realization you seem to be confronted by a barrier standing across the path and dividing the road of freedom from the road of bondage; but as you pass through that barrier it vanishes, for it never existed and the whole road was free.

There is a Zen book called the No-Gate-Barrier (Mumon-kwan) which Nyogen Senzaki translates as “The Gateless Gate.”²⁰ Its author introduces it with this verse:

No gate stands on the public road.

Those who pass this barrier

Walk freely throughout the universe.

A master was once asked by his disciple, “Pray show me the way to deliverance.” The master replied, “Who has ever put you in bondage?” “Nobody.” “If so,” concluded the master, “why should you ask for deliverance?” Another, when asked the same question, answered simply, “Where do you stand now?” Yet another, who was asked a question to the same effect, replied, “There are no byroads, no crossroads here; the hills all the year round are fresh and green; east or west, in whichever direction, you may have a fine walk.” This is indeed straight talking, so clear that it is hard to see, but we shall always think we are blind while we go round looking for sight with open eyes. On one occasion the great master Ummon said:

“In Zen there is absolute freedom; sometimes it negates and at other times it affirms; it does either way at pleasure.” A monk asked, “How does it negate?” “With the passing of winter there cometh spring.” “What happens when spring cometh?” “Carrying a staff across his shoulders, let him ramble about in the fields, east or west, north or south, and beat the old stumps to his heart’s content.”

Joshu said, “The Great Way is right before your eye, but difficult to see.” A monk asked, “What form does it take so that we can see it before us?” “To the south of the river or to the north of it, just as you please.”

The literature of Zen is full of such instances, but the Catholic sinologue Wieger could see in it no more than “a collection of folios filled with incoherent, crazy answers.…These are not, as one might have supposed, allusions to esoteric matters which one would have to know in order to understand. They are mere exclamations escaping from the mouths of morons, momentarily awakened from their coma.”²¹ Needless to say, the accomplished master of Zen is hardly ever found in anything remotely resembling a coma except when he sleeps at night, and although they occasionally refer to themselves as morons Zen masters have been responsible for some of the most superb works of art that China and Japan have produced. It is difficult to see how Wieger could have missed the feeling of freedom in so many of these sayings; for in the man who carries a staff across his shoulders and rambles in the fields, east or west, north or south, beating the old stumps to his heart’s content, do we not find the same state of soul as in the wind that “bloweth where it listeth” and which is likened to everyone that is born of the Spirit?

His thatched cottage gate is closed, and even the wisest know him not. No glimpses of his inner life are to be caught; for he goes on his own way without following the steps of the ancient sages.…He is found in company with wine-bibbers and butchers; he and they are all converted into Buddhas.

—Kakuan²²

Perhaps one of the best ways to catch a glimpse of the Zen experience of freedom is to read its poetry. Thus Hokoji says:

How wondrous and how miraculous, this—

I draw water and I carry fuel.

Then we have this from Mumon:

Hundreds of spring flowers; the autumnal moon;

A refreshing summer breeze; winter snow:

Free thy mind of idle thoughts,

And for thee how enjoyable is every season!

The free man walks straight ahead; he has no hesitations and never looks behind, for he knows that there is nothing in the future and nothing in the past that can shake his freedom. Freedom does not belong to him; it is no more his property than the wind, and as he does not possess it he is not possessed by it. And because he never looks behind his actions are said to leave no trace, like the passage of a bird through the air.

Bamboo shadows sweep the stairs

But stir no dust;

Moonlight reaches the depths

But leaves no trace in the pool.

Here is the verse of one who has suddenly seen the truth and goes forward into life a free man:

For this one rare event

Gladly would I give ten thousand coins of gold!

With a hat on my head and a bundle at my side,

On my staff I carry the breeze and the full moon!

There was one who became enlightened at the sudden playing of a flute, whereat he wrote these lines:

In the days when I had no insight

My heart was sad at the playing of the flute;

But now I have no idle dream—

I let the flute-man play on as he wills.

Do not mistake these poems for the sentimental feelings of untrammeled nature lovers, living far from cities and modern drudgery. The surface of sentiment covers thunder and lightning. Here is the reaction of a Zen poet in the face of sudden death:

Neither earth nor heaven give me refuge;

Body and soul melt to nothingness.

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.