Once upon a time, there was a Zen student who quoted an old Buddhist poem
to his teacher, which says The voices of torrents are from one great
tongue, the lions of the hills are the pure body of Buddha. "Isn't that
right?" he said to the teacher. "It is," said the teacher, "but it's a pity
to say so." It would be, of course, much better, if this occasion were
celebrated with no talk at all, and if I addressed you in the manner of the
ancient teachers of Zen, I should hit the microphone with my fan and leave.
But I somehow have the feeling that since you have contributed to the
support of the Zen Center, in expectation of learning something, a few
words should be said, even though I warn you, that by explaining these
things to you, I shall subject you to a very serious hoax. Because if I
allow you to leave here this evening, under the impression that you
understand something about Zen, you will have missed the point entirely.
Because Zen is a way of life, a state of being, that is not possible to
embrace in any concept whatsoever, so that any concepts, any ideas, any
words that I shall put across to you this evening will have as their
object, showing you the limitations of words and of thinking. Now then, if
one must try to say something about what Zen is, and I want to do this by
way of introduction, I must make it emphatic that Zen, in its essence, is
not a doctrine. There's nothing you're supposed to believe in. It's not a
philosophy in our sense, that is to say a set of ideas, an intellectual net
in which one tries to catch the fish of reality. Actually, the fish of
reality is more like water--it always slips through the net. And in water
you know when you get into it there's nothing to hang on to. All this
universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it is changing. And
when you're thrown into the water after being accustomed to living on the
dry land, you're not used to the idea of swimming. You try to stand on the
water, you try to catch hold of it, and as a result you drown. The only way
to survive in the water, and this refers particularly to the waters of
modern philosophical confusion, where God is dead, metaphysical
propositions are meaningless, and there's really nothing to hang on to,
because we're all just falling apart. And the only thing to do under those
circumstances is to learn how to swim. And to swim, you relax, you let go,
you give yourself to the water, and you have to know how to breathe in the
right way. And then you find that the water holds you up; indeed, in a
certain way you become the water. And so in the same way, one might say if
one attempted to--again I say misleadingly--to put Zen into any sort of
concept, it simply comes down to this:
Cont...(longish)
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/zen/watts-on.txt
