CHAPTER ONE

Zen Culture and the Counter Mind

_ Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.

_Matthew 6:28

_Pre-Buddhist clay figure _(haniwa)

THE ZEN TRADITION extends back some fifteen hundred years to a wandering Indian teacher of meditation named Bodhidharma. As Indian gurus are fond of doing, Bodhidharma left his homeland and journeyed abroad, following what was in those days a well-beaten trail to China. Upon reaching Nanking, he paused to visit the Chinese Emperor Wu, a man known to be a particularly devout Buddhist. The emperor was delighted to receive his famous Indian guest and proceeded immediately to boast of his own accomplishments. "I have built many temples. I have copied the sacred _sutras_. I have led many to the Buddha. Therefore, I ask you: What is my merit: What reward have I earned?" Bodhidharma reportedly growled, "None whatsoever, your Majesty." The emperor was startled but persisted, "Tell me then, what is the most important principle or teaching of Buddhism?" "Vast emptiness," Bodhidharma replied, meaning, of course, the void of nonattachment. Not knowing what to make of his guest, the emperor backed away and inquired, "Who exactly are you who stands before me now?" To which Bodhidharma admitted he had no idea.

Sensing that the emperor was not yet prepared for such teachings, Bodhidharma left the palace and traveled to a mountain monastery to begin a long career of meditation. Over the years his reputation for wisdom gradually attracted many followers--dissident Chinese who rejected classical Buddhism and all its rigmarole in favor of Bodhidharma's meditation, or _dhyana_, a Sanskrit term they pronounced as Ch'an--later to be called Zen by the Japanese. This teaching of meditation and vast emptiness shared very little with other branches of Chinese Buddhism. Ch'an had no sacred images because it had no gods to worship, and it de-emphasized the scriptures, since its central dogma was that dogma is useless. Handed down from master to pupil was the paradoxical teaching that nothing can be taught. According to Ch'an (and Zen), understanding comes only by ignoring the intellect and heeding the instincts, the intuition.

Thus Zen became the religion of the antirational, what might be called the counter mind. The counter mind has taken on more concrete significance in recent years with the discovery that the human mind is not a single entity but is divided into two quite different functional sections. We now know that the left hemisphere of the brain governs the logical, analytical portion of our lives, whereas the right hemisphere is the seat of our intuitive, nonverbal perception and understanding. As far back as the ancient Greeks, we in the West have maintained an almost unshakable belief in the superiority of the analytical side of the mind, and this belief may well be the most consistent distinguishing quality of Western philosophy. By contrast, the East in general and Zen in particular have advanced the opposite view. In fact, Zen masters have deliberately developed techniques (like illogical riddles or _koan_) to discredit the logical, verbal side of the mind so that the intuitive perceptions of the right hemisphere, the counter mind, may define reality.

What is the counter mind really like? What is there about it that has caused Western thinkers to disavow its functions for so many centuries? The answer to these questions is not simple, but the path leading to it is directly before us. Zen has produced a rich culture which we may now examine at length. As the scholar-diplomat Sir George Sansom has pointed out, "The influence of [Zen] upon Japan has been so subtle and pervading that it has become the essence of her finest culture." And in the classical culture of Japan it is possible to find the most revealing examples of the arts of the counter mind. Zen culture invites us to experience reality without the intervening distractions of intellect, categories, analysis. Here we may find the best evidence of what the intuitive side of the mind can produce--evidence all the more fascinating because it repudiates many of the most cherished assumptions of Western civilization.

When examined closely, Zen culture in Japan reveals at least three interrelated aspects or faces. First there are the fine arts, creations of beauty but also devices whereby the Zen masters transmit otherwise inexpressible insights. Interestingly enough, the Zen masters did not trouble to invent new art forms but rather co-opted existing Japanese (and sometimes Chinese) forms and revised them to suit Zen purposes. During medieval times, the Chinese-style gardens so favored by the Japanese aristocracy were adopted for use around Zen temples, but not before they were first converted into small-scale landscape "paintings" and later into monochrome abstractions. Chinese ink painting, both that of the Sung academy and that of eccentric Chinese Ch'an monks, was imported and made the official art of Zen. Ideas from Shinto architecture were combined with design details from mainland Ch'an monasteries to produce the Zen-inspired classic Japanese house. Various types of rustic dramatic skits popular among the Japanese peasants were converted by Zen aesthetes into a solemn theater experience called the No, whose plays and narrative poetry are so austere, symbolic, and profound as to seem a kind of Zen Mass.

In the later years of popular Zen culture, poets revised the standard Japanese poetic form, which might be compared loosely to the Western sonnet, into a shorter, epigrammatic expression of the Zen outlook--the seventeen-syllable Haiku. Zen ceramics are a curious mixture of Japanese folk craft and Chinese technical sophistication; flower arranging is a link between Zen and the Japanese love of nature, blossoms and beauty; even formal Japanese cuisine is often more a celebration of Zen ideals than a response to hunger. The famous Japanese tea ceremony evolved from a Chinese party game into a solemn episode for the celebration of ideal beauty, inner calm, and the Zen concept of living.

The second face of Zen culture is best seen in the way in which Japanese life differs from our own. This is not to suggest that every Japanese is a living exemplar of Zen, but rather that many of the peculiarities--both good and bad--of the way of life we now think of as Japanese are traceable to attitudes stemming from Zen. In the military sphere, Zen influence began as a special approach to swordsmanship and archery and ended as a disciplined contempt for death beyond what any other religion has inspired, save possibly in a few saints. In the military arts, as in other areas of life, Zen both led and followed Japanese culture--molding that culture and also presenting a vehicle for the expression of tendencies far older than Zen, among them the historic Japanese love of nature, the acceptance of hardship as uplifting to the spirit, the refusal to distinguish between the religious and the secular, and the capacity for the most unpleasant sorts of self-discipline. It might be said that the ideals of Zen struck a respondent chord in the Japanese character, bringing harmony where once there had been random notes.

Zen also brought something new to the Japanese which might be described as a religion of tranquility, or the idea that tranquility is the main objective of religion. The underside of this tranquility is its sense of humor. Zen, with its absurdist _koan_, laughs at life much the way the Marx brothers did. What exactly can you make of a philosophical system whose teacher answers the question, "How do you see things so clearly?" with the seeming one-liner, "I close my eyes"? Zen has long used the comic view of life to deflate those who start believing in their own systems and categories. It is easier to be tranquil about existence when you recognize the pointlessness of solemnity.

The other side of the religion of tranquility is the need to maintain peace of mind in the face of chaos. Sitting quietly in meditation is the traditional mainstay of Eastern religion, but Zen manages to carry the mental repose born of meditation back into daily life. This equanimity is the product of inner resources brought into being by spiritual training. You need not study Zen to have it, but it is Zen's most tangible goal. The Japanese, whose ability to ignore external distractions in a hectic world is possibly their best-known national trait, have deliberately used Zen and Zen arts (such as the tea ceremony, flower arranging, or ink painting) to counteract the stresses of modern life.

The follower of Zen is protected from the incursions of the world by an inverted (in our Western terms) understanding of what is real and what illusory. One of the all-time favorite _koan_ helps to make this clear. The _koan_ describes three monks watching a banner flutter in the breeze. One monk observes, "The banner is moving," but the second insists, "The wind is moving." Finally, the third monk says, "You are both wrong. It is your mind that is moving." The point here is that, in modern times, most Westerners view the physical world as the operative reality and the unseen, nonphysical world as an abstraction (comforting or not, depending upon our beliefs or immediate needs, the spiritual world is said to grow less abstract to those in foxholes). But Zen takes the opposite tack; it holds that true reality is the fundamental unity of mind and matter, inner spirit and external world. When life is viewed in such terms, there can be no success or failure, happiness or unhappiness; life is a whole, and you are simply part of it. There are no dualities, hence there is nothing to worry about. The result is perfect tranquility.

Of course, one small thread remains to be tied. What do you do about daily life, where the world carries on as though it really does exist, dualities and all? Quite simply, Zen would have you treat the physical world exactly as followers of Western religions sometimes treat the spiritual world--as a convenient fiction whose phenomena you honor as though they existed, although you know all the while that they are illusions. The world of strife and relative values may trouble those who mistake it for the real thing, but the Zen-man echoes the words of Hamlet, "We that have free souls, it touches us not." The world is in fact meaningless. It is one's mind that is moving.

However startling such a doctrine may be to Western rationalists, it has engendered such Japanese phenomena as the _samurai_ swordsmen and the kamikaze pilot, both of whom could, in the Japanese phrase, live as if already dead. On a less dramatic scale, it allows the modern Japanese to be spiritually content and enjoy mental repose in a crowded subway, or to find solitude in a paper-walled house amid noisy neighbors. They wrap their cocoon of tranquility about them and become spiritually apart. Again, it is possible to enjoy this inner repose without Zen, but only in a Zen culture could it become a national trait.

The third face of Zen, the deep concern with and understanding of what constitutes beauty, also preceded Zen culture in Japan to some degree. As with many of the existing Japanese art forms, the native sense of taste was co-opted by Zen culture and bent to the rules of Zen. Aesthetic discernment was as important for social advancement in medieval, pre-Zen Japan as good grammar is in the West today, and the characteristic attention to small details, the genuine ability to notice things, from the feathered pastel hues of a partially opened blossom to the colored refractions in a drop of dew, was already well developed. In the centuries before Zen, the notion that aesthetics in Japan could reflect a philosophical point of view would have seemed strange. But to the taste-makers of Zen culture the arts were the handmaiden of spiritual ideas; their arts had to make a statement, and as a result art became an expression of religion, not so much a direct, point-blank depiction of religious motifs as in Christian art, but rather a belief that art itself is an inherently religious concern--an idea Zen shares with the ancient Greeks. But whereas the Greeks strove for perfect form as an exemplification of man's kinship with the gods, the Zen artist carefully avoids final perfection, not wishing to idealize a physical world whose very existence he finds problematical.

Perhaps the most noticeable principle of Zen art is its asymmetry; we search in vain for straight lines, even numbers, round circles. Furthermore, nothing ever seems to be centered. Our first impulse is to go into the work and straighten things up--which is precisely the effect the artist intended. Symmetrical art is a closed form, perfect in itself and frozen in completeness; asymmetrical art invites the observer in, to expand his imagination and to become part of the process of creation. The absence of bilateral symmetry mysteriously compels the observer to reach past surface form and touch the individuality of a work. Even more important, Zen asymmetry forcefully draws one away from any mental connection one might have between completed form and notions of completion and timelessness in material things. Zen denies the significance of the external world and underscores the point by never depicting it in static, stable, or closed terms. Greek art was a tribute to perfection; Zen art is a statement, if only implicit, that the objective world should never be taken too seriously.

The ideas taught by asymmetry in the visual arts are paralleled in the literary arts by the device of suggestion. This quality, first seen in pre-Zen aristocratic poetry, was brought to new heights by the Zen Haiku poets. Among other things, a Haiku poem sets you up for the last line, which kicks your imagination spinning into imagery. The most famous Haiku poem of all probably demonstrates this quality as well as any:

_An ancient pond;

A frog leaps in:

The sound of water.

_Try to stop yourself from hearing that splash in your imagination, or try to stifle the images and details your mind wants to fill in. Just as with the off-balance picture or garden, the Zen poet has forced you to be a part of his creation. But more significantly, he has achieved a depth and reverberation impossible with mere words. Explicit art ends with itself; suggestive art is as limitless and profound as one's imagination can make it.

Another obvious quality of Zen art is its simplicity. Again one thinks of the spareness and purity in Greek art, and again the connection is wrong. A more useful comparison would be with the diverse, textured arts of India, whether sensuous statuary or fabrics decorated over every square inch. Indian art is a celebration of life and vigor, whereas Zen, with its philosophy that categories and distinctions do not exist, is naturally unsympathetic to decorative multiplicity. The happy result of this rather sober outlook is that Zen art seems surprisingly modern; it is never cluttered, busy, gaudy, overdone. The forms--whether in the classic Japanese house, the stone garden, or a simple ceramic pot--are invariably clean and elegant. And by avoiding overstatement, the Zen artist manages to convey the impression of disciplined restraint, of having held something in reserve. The result is a feeling of strength, the sense that one has only glimpsed the power of the artist rather than experienced everything he had to offer. The Zen artist may deny one voluptuousness, but in the empty spaces one senses a hidden plenitude.

Along with simplicity goes naturalness and lack of artifice. Zen art always seems spontaneous and impulsive, never deliberate, thought-out, or contrived. To achieve this, the artist must so master his technique that it never interferes with his intentions. Again the lesson is contempt for the material world; one must never give the impression of having taken one's art, or

indeed life itself, too seriously. This deceiving sense of naturalness is particularly striking in the later Zen ceramic art, in which potters went out of their way to give their bowls a coarse, uneven finish. They tried very hard to give the impression that they were not trying at all. The joinery of the Japanese house is first assembled with the care even an early European cabinetmaker might find excessive; and then it is left unpolished, to age naturally! Such is the inverted snobbery of Zen aesthetics.

Another quality of Zen art is its understatement or restraint. It does not yield all its secrets on first viewing; there are always depths which become apparent with further study. This storehouse of latent profundity is frequently found in the narrative poetry of the No drama, which, although suggestive in something like the manner of the lighter Haiku poems, has a cutting edge capable of slowly penetrating the deeper emotions. Through language seemingly concerned only with externalities, the characters of the No give us the full sense of their inner anguish, somehow communicating to us sorrows too deep for words. In the same way, Zen-inspired stone gardens have hidden qualities. Unlike formal European or Persian gardens, which are mainly surface and reward the viewer with all their decorative beauty on the first visit, Zen gardens present you with new pleasures and insights each time you study them. Because it conceals its profundity, Zen art is never fully knowable on first acquaintance; there is always something more when one is prepared to receive it.

Perhaps the most puzzling, yet curiously rewarding, aesthetic principle in Zen art is its seeming celebration of the ravages of time. The Zen Japanese consider a taste for newness the mark of the aesthetic parvenu. To be sure, Westerners who have acquired a preference for antiques are sometimes looked upon as more sophisticated than those preferring the latest machine-made item; yet Zen taste has an important difference--the Japanese would never "restore" an antique. The signs of age and wear are to them its most beautiful qualities. This convoluted attitude actually began in pre-Zen aristocratic times, when courtiers concluded that the reason cherry blossoms or autumn leaves were so beautiful was their short season. Soon, the more perishable something was, the more aesthetically satisfying it became. (One unfortunate result of this point of view was a lot of mediocre poetry about the dew.) Later, Zen took over this attitude, extending it to things that perish slowly, and before long, things old and worn out--already perished, in a sense--were thought the most beautiful of all. This idea fitted well with the Zen notion that material things were dross and should not be accorded excessive importance. The curious thing is that the idea works; old objects, desiccated and apparently used up, have a nobility that makes one contemplate eternity and scorn the fashions of the moment. Broken and patched tea bowls or frayed scrolls seemingly falling apart are indeed more beautiful than they were when new. The patina of age is a lesson that time is forever and that you, creature of an hour, would do well to know humility in the face of eternity.

Finally, the aesthetic principles of Zen culture's third face also reflect the practical concerns of its second face, tranquility. Zen art exudes an unmistakable calm and repose of the spirit. Contemplating a stone garden or viewing the measured movements of the tea ceremony, one realizes that Zen art is certain of itself, and it imparts this certainty, this gentle voice of inner calm, to one's spirit. The things that matter are settled, and those that do not are winnowed out like chaff in the wind. And here you realize that Zen art is, last and foremost, a virile creation of strength and surety.

Perhaps the most startling thing about the Zen creations of the counter mind is that few Japanese are willing even to discuss them, let alone analyze them. Zen is the enemy of analysis, the friend of intuition. Analysis is to art what grammar is to a living language, the dull afterthought of the scholar, and Zen culture despises excessive interpretation as a leech on the spirit of life. The Zen artist understands the ends of his art intuitively, and the last thing he would do is create categories; the avowed purpose of Zen is to eliminate categories! The true Zen-man holds to the old Taoist proverb, "Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know." Ask a Japanese to "explain" a Zen rock garden and he will inspect you blankly, uncomprehending. The question will never have occurred to him, and he may try to spare you embarrassment by pretending you never asked or by changing the subject. Should you persist, he may go out and take its dimensions for you, thinking by this objective, modern response to satisfy your Western requirements. When you stop asking and surrender to a kind of intuitive osmosis, you will have begun the journey into the culture of the counter mind.