Quotations from Alan Watts (This Is It)
In Zen the satori experience of awakening to our ‘original inseparability’ with
the universe seems, however elusive, always just around the corner. One has
even met people to whom it has happened, and they are just like us, and yet
much more at home in the world, floating much more easily upon the ocean of
transience and insecurity.
Buddhism does not deny that there is a relatively limited sphere in which human
life may be improved by art and science, reason and good will. However, it
regards this sphere of activity as important but nonetheless subordinate to the
comparatively limitless sphere in which things are as they are, always have
been, and always will be – a sphere entirely beyond the categories of good and
evil, success and failure, and individual health and sickness.
I find that I cannot help doing and experiencing, quite freely, what is always
‘right’ in the sense that the stars are always in their ‘right’ places. As
Hsiang=yen put it,
There’s no use for artificial discipline,
For, move as I will, I manifest the ancient Tao.
