UNDER CONSTRUCTION

III

What, exactly, is Zen?

If we read the Iaconic and sometimes rather violent stories of the Zen masters, we find that this is a dangerously loaded question: dangerous above all because the Zen tradition absolutely refuses to tolerate any abstract or theoretical answer to it. In fact, it must be said at the outset that philosophically or dogmatically speaking, the question probably has no satisfactory answer. Zen simply does not lend itself to logical analysis. The word "Zen" comes from the Chines Ch'an, which designates a certain type of mediations, yet Zen is not a "method of meditation" or a kind of spirituality. It is a "way" and an "experience," a "life," but the way is paradoxically "not a way." Zen is therefore not a religion, not a philosophy, not a system of thought, not a doctrine, not an ascesis. In calling it a kind of "natural mysticism," Father Dumoulin is bravely submitting to the demands of Western thought, which as avid, at any price, for essences. But I think he would not find too many Eastern minds who would fully agree with him on this point, even though he is, in face, giving Zen the highest praise he feels a Christian theologian can accord it. The truth is, Zen does not even lay claim to be "mystical," and the most widely read authority on the subject, Daisetz Suzuki, has expended no little effort in trying to deny the fact that Zen is "mysticism." This, however, is perhaps more a matter of semantics than anything else.

The Zen insight cannot be communicated in any kind of doctrinal formula or even in an precise phenomenological description. This is probably what Suzuki means when he says it is "not mystical": that it does not present clear and definitely recognizable characteristics capable of being set down in words. True, the genuineness of the Zen illumination is certainly recognizable, but only by one who has attained the insight himself. And here of course we run into the first of the abominable pitfalls that meet anyone who tries to write of Zen. For to suggest that it is "an experience" which a "subject" is capable of "having" is to use terms that contradict all the implications of Zen.

Hence it is quite false to imagine that Zen is sort of individualistic, subjective purity in which the mind seeks to rest and find spiritual refreshment by the discovery and enjoyment of his own interiority. It is not a subtle form of spiritual self-gratification, a repose in the depths of one's own inner silence. Nor is it by any means a simple withdrawal from the outer world of matter in an inner world of spirit. The first and most elementary fact about Zen is its abhorrence of this dualistic division between matter and spirit. Any criticism of Zen that presupposes such a division is, therefore, bound to go astray.

Like all forms of Buddhism, Zen seeks an "enlightenment" which results from the resolution of all subject-object relationships and oppositions in a pure void. But to call this void a mere negation is to reestablish the oppositions which are resolved in it. This explains the peculiar insistence of the Zen masters on "neither affirming nor denying." Hence it is impossible to attain satori (enlightenment) merely by quietistic inaction or the suppression of thought. Yet at the same time "enlightenment" is not an experience of activity of a thinking and self-conscious subject. Still less is it a vision of Buddha, or an experience of an "I-Thou" relationship with a Supreme Being considered as object of knowledge and perception. However, Zen does not deny the existence of a Supreme Being either. It neither affirms nor denies, it simply is. One might say that Zen is the ontological awareness of pure being beyond subject and object, an immediate grasp of being in its "suchness" and "thusness."

But the peculiarity of this awareness is that it is not reflexive, not self-conscious, not philosophical, not theological,. It is in some sense entirely beyond the scope of psychological observation and metaphysical reflection. For want of a better term, we may call it "purely spiritual."

In order to preserve this purely spiritual quality, the Zen masters staunchly refuse to rationalize of verbalize the Zen experience. They relentlessly destroy all figments of the mind or imagination that pretend to convey its meaning. they even go so far as to say: "If you meet the Buddha, kill him!" They refuse to answer speculative or metaphysical questions except with words which are utterly trivial and which are designed to dismiss the question itself as irrelevant.

When asked, "If all phenomena return to the One, where does the One return to?" the Zen master Joshu simply said, "When I lived in Seiju, I made a robe out of hemp and it weighed ten pounds."

This is a useful and salutary mondo (saying) for the Western reader to remember. It will guard him against the almost irresistible temptation to think of Zen in Neo-Platonic terms. Zen is not a system of pantheistic monism. It is not a system of any kind. It refuses to make any statements as all about the metaphysical structure of being and existence. Rather it points directly to being itself, without indulging in speculation.

Father Dumoulin does not attempt to explain Zen or analyze it. He treats it with respectful and historic objectivity. he tells us where it came from, how it developed, and what the various schools were. Though Suzuki and the other writers on Zen are generally careful to identify the Zen masters whom they quote, and to try to situate them in their context, a simple yet complete historical outline has long been badly needed. Father Dumoulin gives us the whole picture. After some early chapters on Indian Buddhism, with necessary information on the Mahayana sutras (without which Zen is not fully understandable), he speaks of the introduction of Zen to China by the semilegendary Bodhidharma, a contemporary of St. Benedict of the West (sixth century A.D.).

In point of fact, Zen was not suddenly "introduced" to China by any one man. It is a product of the combination of Mahayana Buddhism with Chinese Taoism which was later transported to Japan and further refined there. Through Bodhidharma is regarded as the first in a line of Zen patriarchs who have "directly transmitted" the enlightenment experience of the Buddha without written media or verbal formulas, the way for Zen was certainly prepared before him. The four-line verse (gatha) attributed to Bodhidharma, and purporting to contain a summary of his "doctrine," was actually composed later, during the T'ang Dynasty, when Zen reached its highest perfection in China. The verse reads:

A special tradition outside the scriptures (i.e., sutras)

No dependenc upon words and letters,

Direct pointing at the soul (center) of man,

Seeing into one's own nature and the attainment of buddhahood

It is clear from this that Zen insists on concrete practice rather than on study or intellectual mediation, as a way of attaining enlightenment. The key phrase of this verse is: "Direct pointing at the soul of man," and this is practically repeated in the synonymous phrase that follows: "Seeing into one's own nature." The commonly accepted translation "seeing into the soul of man" is however, rather unfortunate. It suggests an opposition between body-soul, spirit and matter, which is not to be found in Zen, or at least not in the way that such terms might suggest to us. This, in fact, rather disconcerted St. Francis Xavier when he converted with his friend the Zen master Ninshitsu. The good old man did not seem to know whether or not he had "a soul." In fact, to him the concept that "a soul" was sort of object that "one" could be considered as "having" and eve, "saving" was completely unfamiliar. He sought salvation, indeed, but this search could only be expressed in utterly different terms.

In other texts of Bodhidharma'a verse, the word here given as soul is "mind" (h'sin) is more than a psychological concept. Nor is it equivalent to eh scholastic idea of the soul as "form of the body." Yet it is certainly considered a principle of being. Can we consider it a spiritual essence" I think not.

Suzuki says that "mind" in this sense is "an ultimate reality which is aware of itself and is not the seat of our empirical consciousness." this "mind" for the Zen masters is not he intellectual faculty as such but rather what the Rhenish mystics called the "ground" of our soul or of our being, a "ground" which is not only entitative but enlightened and aware, because it is in immediate contact with God. In the Zen context, "mind" has a kind of ontological value which brings it close to the parallel term "nature" in the next line. but its connotations are existentialist, dynamic, and concrete. The New Testament term that might possible correspond to it, though of course with many differences, is St. Paul's "spirit" or "pneuma."

It must be admitted that a great deal of study remains to be done to clarify the basic concepts of Buddhism, which have usually been translated by Western terms that have quite different implications. We have habitually taken Western metaphysical concepts as equivalent to Buddhist terms, which are not metaphysical but religious or spiritual, that is to say, expressions not of abstract speculation but of concrete spiritual experience.

As a result, we have read our abstract Western divisions into an Oriental experience that has nothing whatever to do with them, and we have also presumed that Oriental contemplation corresponded in every way with Western philosophical modes of contemplation and spirituality. Hence the mystifying use of terms like "individualism," "subjectivism," pantheism," etc., one on top of the other, in our discussion of something like Zen. Actually these terms are worse than useless in this case. They serve only to make Zen utterly inaccessible.

The Zen insight, as Bodhidharma indicates, consists in a direct grasp of "mind" or one's "original face." And this direct grasp implies rejection of all conceptual media or methods, so that one arrives at mind by "having no mind" (wu h'sin): in fact, by "being" mind instead of "having" it. Zen enlightenment is an insight into being in all its existential reality and actualization. It is a fully alert and superconscious act of being which transcends time and space. Such is the attainment of the "Buddha mind," or "Buddhahood." (Compare the Christian expressions "having the mind of Christ" 1 Cor. 2:16, being "of one spirit with Christ," "He who is united to the Lord is one spirit" 1 Cor. 6:17, though the Buddhist idea takes no account of any "supernatural order" in the Thomist sense.) The Zen insight is the awareness of full spiritual reality, and therefore the realization of the emptiness of all limited or particularized realities. Hence it is not individual spiritual nature or (as Zachner would say) of our "pre-biological unity."

One might ask if our habitual failure to distinguish between "empirical ego" and the "person" has not led us to oversimplify and falsify our whole interpretation of Buddhism. There are in Zen certain suggestions of a higher and more spiritual personalism than one might at first sight expect. Zen insight is at once a liberation form the limitations of the individual ego, and discovery of one's "original nature" and "true face" in "mind" which is no longer restricted to the empirical self but is in all and above all. Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us. This is not a pantheistic submersion or a loss of self in "nature" or "the One." It is not a withdrawal into one's spiritual essence and a denial of matter and of the world. On the contrary, it is a recognition that the whole world is aware of itself in me, and that "I" am no longer any individual and limited self, still less a disembodied soul, but that my "identity is not the denial of my own personal reality but its highest affirmation. it is a discovery of genuine identity in and with the One, and this is expressed in the paradox of Zen, form which the explicit concept of person in the highest sense is unfortunately absent, since here too the person tends to be equated with the individual.

IV

The most critical moment in the history of Chinese Zen is evidently the split between the northern and southern schools (seventh century). This extremely complex affair nevertheless has one feature which is important for the real understanding of Zen: the events which led to the choosing of the "Sixth Patriarch," Hui Neng.

When the time came for Hung Jen, the fifth patriarch, to transmit his role and dignity to a successor, he asked each of his monks to compose a verse which would testify to the candidate's Zen insight. Presumably the one whose verse was most adequate would be worthy to succeed him as patriarch, because he would be the one whose Zen enlightenment was most authentic.

Foremost amongst eh disciples of the old man was Shen Hsiu. He was a senior in the community, outstanding for life experience, and his succession was taken as a foregone conclusion. He composed a verse which ran as follows:

	The body is the Bodhi-tree (under which Buddha was enlightened),
	The wind is like a clear mirror standing,
	Take care to wipe it all the time,
	Allow no grain of dust to cling to it.

Anyone familiar with routine descriptions of the contemplative experience, East of West, will recognize this approach. It is, as a matter of fact, very close to Neo-Platonism. It suggests (probably more in the translation than in the original) the familiar Greek division between mind and matter, and it situates enlightenment in a state of immaterial purity in essential repose, and in the absence of concepts. It indicates a program of purification and recollection, a "liberation" of the soul from the terrestrial and temporal condition imposed on it by the body and the five senses, so that it rests in our ideal essence or nature.

As a matter of fact, this is the kind of thing that the Western reader would be perfectly ready to accept as Zen. But it is rejected with impassioned scorn by the Zen masters. Another member of Hung Jen's monastic community, who was not even a monk but an illiterate oblate working in the kitchen, reacted against the inadequacy of the verse, and posted another verse of his own, which he (and later generations of Zen masters) felt to be more satisfactory. In fact, this untrained peasant, Hui Neng, was preferred to Shen Hsiu and succeeded Hung Jen as the sixth patriarch. Here is the verse:

	The Bodhi is not like a tree,
	The clear mirror is nowhere standing.
	Fundamentally not one thing exists,
	Where then is a grain of dust to cling?

Here the Western reader is likely to be both disconcerted and misled. He will seize upon the phrase "not one thing exists," in order to account his anxieties: but if he thinks this is a statement of fundamental principle, a declaration of pantheism, he is wrong. As Suzuki says, "When the Sutras declare all things to be empty, unborn and beyond all causation, the declaration is not the result of metaphysical reasoning; it is a most penetrating Buddhist experience." As usual Suzuki avoids the use of the word "mystical," but statements about the "nothingness" of beings and of "oneness" in Buddhism are to be interpreted just like the figurative terms of Western mystics describing their experience of God: the language is not metaphysical but poetic and phenomenological. The Zen insight is a direct grasp of being in itself, but not an intuition of the nature of being. Nor can the Zen insight be described in psychological terms, and to think of it as a subjective experience "attainable" by some kind of process of mental purification is to doom oneself to error and absurdity. This error came to be described as "mirror-wiping Zen," since is imagines that the mind is like a mirror which "one" (who?) has to keep clean. To illustrate this, here is another well-known Zen story:

	A Master saw a disciple who was very zealous in meditation.
	The Master said: "Virtuous one, what is your aim in practicing Zazen (meditation)?
	The disciple said: "My aim is to become a Buddha."
	The the Master picked up a tile and began to polish it on a stone in front of the hermitage.
	The disciple said: "What is the Master doing?"
	The Master said: "I am polishing this tile to make it a mirror."
	The disciple said: "How can you make a mirror by polishing a tile?"
	The Master replied: "How can you make a Buddha by practicing Zazen?"

The capital importance of this story is that it shows, once for all, what the Zen of Hui Neng is not. It is not a technique of introversion by which one seeks to exclude matter and the external world, to eliminate distracting thoughts, to sit in silence emptying the mind of images, and to concentrate on the purity of one's own spiritual essence, whether or not this essence be regarded as a mirror of the divinity. Zen is not a mysticism of introversion and withdrawal. it is neither quietism nor Hesychasm. It is not "acquired contemplation."

On the other hand, I believe one must not interpret stories like this to mean that the school of Hui Neng attached no importance whatever to meditation, or thought that no preliminary discipline was required: enlightenment would come suddenly all by itself. Dumoulin himself seems to have interpreted Hui Neng's doctrine of "sudden enlightenment" in this way, for he says: "The elimination of all preliminary stages and the renunciation of all preparatory exercises is the typical Chinese element in the Zen of Hui Neng" (p. 96).

It is true that Hui Neng did revolutionized Buddhist spirituality by discounting the practice of formal and prolonged meditation, referred to zazen ("sitting in meditation"). He placed no confidence in self-emptying introversion. yet it would be misleading to think that the "renunciation of preparatory exercises" means "no preparation" or the rejection of formal zazen means "no meditation." This way of interpreting Hui Neng accounts for the common opinion of Westerners that his spirituality, and that of Zen in general, is "quietistic." Hui Neng was no quietist. On the contrary, he was reacting against a quietistic type of spirituality. But his reaction was not activist either. Yet we can say it was dynamic. It was a breakthrough into something quite original and new. he refused to separate meditation as a means (dhyana) from enlightenment as an end (prajna). For him, the two were really inseparable, and the Zen discipline consisted in seeking to realize this wholeness and unity of prajna and dhyana in all one's acts, however external, however commonplace, however trivial. For Hui Neng, all life was Zen. Zen could not be found merely by turning away form active life to become absorbed in meditation. Zen is the very awareness of the dynamism of life living itself in us - and aware of itself, it us, as being the one life that lives in all.

When, in his verse about the "mirror," Hui Neng rejected the "mirror wiping" concept of meditation, he was therefore not rejecting meditation itself, but what he believed to be a totally wrong attitude to mediation. We may sum up the "wrong" attitude in the following terms.

1. This wrong attitude assumes and gives primacy to a central ego-consciousness, an awareness of an empirical self, an "I" which, with all the good intentions in the world, sees out to "achieve liberation" or "enlightenment." this is the familiar empirical ego which is aware of itself, observes itself, remembers itself, and seeks ways to preserve and perpetuate its self-awareness. This "I" seeks to affirm itself not only in its actions, and its thoughts, but also in contemplation. In stripping off the exterior and sensible trappings of superficial experience, the ego seeks to realize its own spiritual nature more perfectly. this implies a rejection of one's sensible and active self in order to attain to an inner "silent" self, which is still, however, our "ego."

2. The empirical and self-conscious self then view its own thought as a king of object or possession, and in so doing accounts for this thought by situation it in a separate, isolated "art of itself," a mind, which it compares to a "mirror." This is also considered a "possession." "I have a mind." Thus the mind is regarded not as something I am, but something I own. It then becomes necessary for me to sit quietly and calmly, recollecting my faculties and reaching down to experience my "mind."

3. The empirical self then resolves to purify the mirror of the mind by removing thoughts from it. When the mirror of the mind is clear of all thought (so it imagines), the ego will be 'liberated." It will affirm itself freely without thoughts. Why does it aim at this bizarre attainment" Because it has read in the sutras that enlightenment is a state of "emptiness," and "suchness." It is an awareness of an inner and transcendental mind. Presumably if all thoughts of material and contingent things are kept out of the mirror, then the mirror will be filled with the pure spiritual light of the Buddha mind, which is a kind of "emptiness."

At best, this contemplation is an ascent from the external and empirical consciousness to a higher and more general, consciousness of one's spiritual nature. The lower self is then dissolved in the consciousness of a universal ideal nature which transcends the external concrete self.

What has happened is that this clinging and possessive ego-consciousness, seeking to affirm itself in "liberation," craftily tries to outwit reality by rejecting the thoughts it "possesses" and emptying the mirror of the mind, which it also "possesses." Thus, "the mind" will be in "emptiness" and "poverty." But in reality, "emptiness" itself is regarded as a possession, and and "attainment." So the ego-consciousness is able, it believes, to eat its cake and have it. It renounces its empirical autonomy in order to sink into its spiritual, pre-biological nature. But since this nature is regarded as one's possession, the "spiritualized" ego thus is able to affirm itself all the more perfectly, and to enjoy its own narcissism under the guise of "emptiness" and "contemplation.

Now as Hui Neng point out, I think quite rightly from any point of view, this elaborate mental fabrication is a naive and pointless artifice. Indeed, it is not only useless but deceitful and pernicious, since it induces an illusion that the empirical ego has transcended the conditions of matter and of egotistical selfhood by "using" and "managing" separate entities such as the will, the intellect, and so on. Admittedly, these faculties are all quite real, and we must certainly have some way of talking about them and dealing with them when it is necessary to do so. But since in deeper spiritual experience they do not function according to the imagery which is adequate for ordinary, everyday life, it becomes necessary to discard that imagery and to speak in other terms.

It is quite true to say that the "sun rises" and the "sun sets" according to our empirical, everyday experience. But such terminology is no longer adequate for the professional concerns of a space man. So too, the Zen masters realized that to speak of the mind as a mirror which is "owned" by the ego and which must be kept pure by the exclusion of all thoughts was from the point of view of Zen understanding, sheer nonsense. Such language does not come anywhere near giving a proper notion of what true insight is. Hui Neng therefore described it in other terms, in which, of course, he had been anticipated by many centuries in the Mahayana sutras, particularly the Diamond Sutra.

For Hui Neng the central reality in meditation, or indeed in life itself, is not the empirical ego but that ultimate reality which is at once pure being and pure awareness which we referred to above as "mind" (h'sin). Because he contrasts it with the "conscious" empirical self, Hui Neng calls this "ultimate mind" the Unconscious (we nien). (This is equivalent to the Sanskrit prajna, or wisdom.)

It must be said here that the "Unconscious" of Hui Neng is totally different from the unconscious as it is conceived by modern psychoanalysis. To confuse these two ideas would be a fatal error. As Bodidharma said, the "Unconscious" (prajna) is a principle of being and light secretly at work in our conscious mind making it aware of transcendent reality. But this true awareness is not a matter of the empirical ego standing back and "having ideas," "possessing knowledge," or even "attaining to insight" (satori). That might be all right in the Cartesian realm of scientific abstraction. but here we are dealing with the vastly different realm of prajna-wisdom. Hence, what matters now is for the conscious to realized itself as identified with and illuminated by the Unconscious, in such a way that there is no longer any division or separation between the two. It is not that the empirical mind is "absorbed in prajna, but simply that prajna is, and nothing else has any relevance except as its manifestation.

Indeed, it is not the empirical self which "possesses" prajna-wisdom, or owns "an unconscious" as one might have a cellar in one's house. In reality, the conscious belongs to the transcendental unconscious, is possessed by it, and carries out its work, or it should do so. Its destiny is to manifest in itself the light of that Being by which it subsists, as a Christian philosopher might say. It becomes one, as we would, with God's own light, and St. John's expression, the "light which enlightens every man coming into this world" (John 1:9), seems to correspond pretty closely to the idea of prajna and of Hui Neng's "Unconscious."

This then is what Hui Neng means when he says "mirror wiping" is useless. There is no mirror to be wiped. What we call "our" mind is only a flickering and transient manifestation of prajna - the formless and limitless light. We cannot be enlightened by cutting the manifestation off fro the original light and giving it an autonomous existence which it cannot possible have. Another Zen master said, characteristically that there is no enlightenment to be attained and no subject to attain it. "No one has ever attained it in the past or will ever attain it in the future, for it is beyond attainability. Thus there is nothing to be thought of except the Unconscious itself. This is called true thought." Therefore Bodidharma said, "All the attainments of the Buddhas are really nonattainments."

As long as the empirical ego stands back and imagines itself to be illuminated by any light whatever, whether its own or beyond itself, and strives to see things in its "own mind" as in a mirror, it simply affirms itself as distinct from a source outside itself to which it must attain, because it is "separate" and distant. But in actual fact, Hui Neng says, there is no attainment, and therefore to busy oneself about seeking a "way" to attainment is pure self-deception. Zen is not "attained" by mirror-wiping meditation, but by self-forgetfulness in the existential present of life here and now.

This reminds us of St. John of the Cross and his teaching that the "Spiritual Way" is falsely conceived if it is thought to be a denial of flesh, sense, and vision in order to arrive at higher spiritual experience. On the contrary, the "dark night of sense" which sees the house of flesh at rest is at best a serious beginning. The true dark night is that of the spirit, where the "subject" of all higher forms of vision and intelligence is itself darkened and left in emptiness; not as a mirror, pure of all impressions, but as a void without knowledge and without any natural capacity to know the supernatural. it is an error to think that St. John of the Cross teachers denial of the body and the senses as a way to reach a higher and more secret mystical knowledge. On the contrary, he teachers that the light of God shines in all emptiness where there is no natural subject to receive it. To this emptiness there is in reality no definite way. "To enter upon the way is to leave the way," for the way itself is emptiness.

We are plagued today with the heritage of that Cartesian self-awareness, which assumed that the empirical ego is the starting point of an infallible intellectual progress to truth and spirit, more and more refined, abstract and immaterial.

Now this state of affairs can never be remedied by the empirical ego's merely going through gestures of purification and concentration, suppressing ought, creating a void in itself, sinking into its own essential purity, and so on. This is only another way of affirming itself as an independent, autonomous possessor now of thought, no of no-thought; now of science , now of contemplation,; no of ideas, now of emptiness;. The "emptiness" which the empirical ego strives to produce in itself by "wiping the mirror" clean of all thoughts is then nothing but a trick. At best is is bogus mysticism; and at worst, schizophrenia. In any case, it is pure illusion, and it makes true enlightenment impossible. This is precisely what Zaehner stigmatizes as "individualism" and "passive mysticism" in its most refined and dangerous sense.

V

As Hui Neng say, it really makes no difference whatever if external objects are present in the "mirror" of consciousness. There is no need to exclude or suppress them. Enlightenment does not consist in being without them. True emptiness in the realization of the underlying prajna-wisdom of the Unconscious is attained when the light of prajna (the Greek Fathers would say of the "Logos"; Zaehner would say "spirit" or "pneuma") breaks through our empirical consciousness  and floods with its intelligibility not only our whole being but all the things that we see and know around us. We are thus transformed in the prajna light, we "become" that light, which in fact we "are." We see the light in everything. In such a situation, the presence of external objects and concepts in our mind is irrelevant, for our knowledge of them is no longer obtained by thinking about them as objects. We know them in a vastly different way, as we now know ourselves not in ourselves, not in our mind, but in prajna, or, as a Christian would say, in God.

This state of "enlightenment" then has nothing to do with the exclusion of external or material reality, and when it denies the "existence" of the empirical self and of external objects, this denial is not he denial of their reality (which is neither affirmed nor denied) but of their relevance insofar as they are isolated in their own forms. They have become irrelevant because the subject-object relationship that existed when the empirical self regarded them and cherished its thoughts about them has now been abolished in the "void." but this void is by no means a mere negation. It would be more helpful for Western minds to call it s a pure affirmation of the fullness of positive being, through Buddhists would prefer to stick to their principle, neither affirming nor negating.

The void (or the Unconscious) may be said to have two aspects. First, it simply is what it is. Second, it is realized, it is aware of itself, and to speak improperly, this awareness (prajna) is "in us," or better, we are "in it." Here of course the mirror of the "mind" is not our mind but he void itself, the Unconscious as manifest and conscious in us. Hui Neng describes it in the following terms:

"When the light of Prajna penetrates the ground nature of consciousness (In this translation, Suzuki is obviously thinking of Eckhart) it illuminates inside and outside; everything grows transparent and one recognizes one's inmost mind. To recognize the inmost mind is emancipation . . . this means the realization of the Unconscious (wu nien). What is the Unconscious? It is to see things as they are and not to become attached to anything . . . To be unconscious means to be innocent of the working of a relative (empirical) mind. . . . When there is no abiding of thought anywhere on anything - this is being unbound. This not abiding anywhere is the rood of our life."

Prajna, therefore, is not attained when one teaches a deeper interior center in one's self (Suzuki's translation, "one's inmost mind," might be misleading here). It does not consist in "abiding" in a secret mystical point in one's own being, but in abiding nowhere in particular, neither in self nor out of self. It does not consist in self-realization as an affirmation of one's own limited being, or as fruition of one's inner spiritual essence, but on the contrary it is liberated from any need of self-affirmation and self-realization whatever. In a word, prajna is not self-realization, but realization pure and simple, beyond subject and object. In such realization, evidently "emptiness" is no longer opposed to "fullness," but emptiness and fullness are One. Zero equals infinity.

:	Another Zen Master was asked how this enlightenment could be attained. He answered; "Only by seeing into nothingness."
	Disciple: "Nothingness: but is this not something to see?" (I.e., does it not become an object - the empty mirror, unstained by "thought"?)
	Master: "Though there is the act of seeing, the object is not to be designated as something."
	Disciple: "If this is not to be designated as 'something' (object), what is the seeing?"
	Master: "To see where there is no something (object), this is true seeing, this is eternal seeing."

Where there is a "something," a limited or defined object, there is less than Act, therefore not "fullness." Once again, "emptiness" of all limited forms is the fullness of the One: but he One must never be regarded as an isolated form. To avoid this temptation, the Zen masters speak always of emptiness.

VI

It is impossible to get a real grasp of Zen if one does not understand the distinction between the two concepts of "mind" propounded by the Southern School of Hui Neng and the Northern School of Shen Hsiu. This resolves itself into a real grasp of the difference between the two verses ascribed (at leat by posterity) to the two contestants for the title fo the Sixth Patriarch.

It is possible to misunderstand the true import of Hui Neng if one is unduly anxious to bring Zen a little closer to conventional Western ideas of contemplation, so that the Zen experience can be more clearly demonstrated to be soemthing akin to supernatural mysticism, that is to say, to an "I-Thou" experince of God. To reconcile Zen with this type of union with God is a very difficult task, becasue it seems to involve one, again, in the subject-object relationship which is discarded by the Zen experience of void. But is it after all neccessary to cling ot this one viewpoint? Is Martin Buber's formual absolutely the only one that validly describes this ultimate spiru8tal experience? Is a personal encounter with a personal God limited to an experience of God as "object" of knowledge and love on the part of a clearly defined, individual, and empirical subject? Or does not the empirical self vanish in the highest forms of Christian mysticism? It is my opinion that even the contemplation of the void as described by Hui Neng has definite affirmites with well-known records of Christian mystic experience, but space does nto permit us to quote texts here.

In any even, there ishow Father Dumoulin describes the "void" and "unconsciousness" of Hui Neng:

"The resolving of all opposites in the Void is the basic metaphysical doctrine of the Diamond Sutra

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Dogen not only gave himself with total generosity to zazen (sitting in meditation) and taught his disciples the best method, but "he saw in zazen the realization and fulfillment of the whole law of Buddha." Among Buddhists, his approach is called the religion of "zazen only" and is regarded as "the return to the purr tradition of Buddha and the patriarchs." On one point, Dogen seems to rejoin Hui Neng, or to come close to a similar result, when he teaches the Zen monk not to desire any special experience of enlightenment. Anotherwards, Do not think about how to become a Buddha. The purposelessness upon which Dogen insists above all is not difficult to comprehend if one grasps that enlightenment is already present in zazen itself. Now this is and is not like Hui Neng. It is like Hui Neng in that it warns the monk not to look for enlightenment as a special psychological state. but it is completely unlike Hui Neng when it states that zazen contains in itself the substance and reality of enlightenment, so that the mere fact of persevering in meditation is, in practice, to be "enlightened."

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