Zen: Beat & Square

Zen Buddhism is growing more chic by the minute. Latest evidence: the summer issue of Chicago Review, which contains nine articles on the subject, a poem, and an excerpt from Zen-loving, "beat" Novelist Jack (On the Road) Kerouac's forthcoming The Dharma Bums. Begins Kerouac: "LET THERE BE BLOWING-OUT AND BLISS FOREVERMORE."

Long rooted in Japan, Zen is an ancient Chinese technique of mind-breaking discipline aimed at freeing the will. All things bubble along in one interrelated continuum, says Zen. Why try to "grasp" or "stop" them? The real problem is spontaneity: how to "let go" and "go with" the permanent impermanence. The Zen disciple must destroy his ego-consciousness, until his real self calmly floats on the world's confusion like a pingpong ball skimming down a mountain stream.

For Anglo-Saxons, says Author Alan W. Watts, former Anglican priest and a leading U.S. exponent of Zen, the main obstacle to the achievement of Zen's peace is an inability to purge themselves of the need for self-justification. This urge to prove oneself right "has always jiggled the Chinese sense of the ludicrous." The Chinese rated human-heartedness ahead of righteousness, felt that one could not be right without also being wrong. "At the roots of Chinese life there is a trust in the good-and-evil of one's own nature which is peculiarly foreign to those brought up with the chronic uneasy conscience of the Hebrew-Christian cultures."

Floating on the Ocean. Watts feels that Westerners are attracted by Zen partly because it shuns supernaturalism. "In Zen the safari 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 no longer mysterious occultists in the Himalayas nor skinny yogis in cloistered ashrams. 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."

But for the Westerner who would understand Zen, there is one prerequisite: "He must really have come to terms with the Lord God Jehovah and with his Hebrew-Christian conscience so that he can take it or leave it without fear of rebellion. He must be free of the itch to justify himself. Lacking this, his Zen will be either 'beat' or 'square,' either a revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stuffiness and respectability."

No Fuss. The Beat Generation have Zen wrong. "Because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say 'To hell with it,' nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes." Square Zen is just as far off the true beam. It is "the Zen of established tradition in Japan, with its clearly defined hierarchy, its rigid discipline, and its specific tests of satori." Though far better than "the common-or-garden squareness of the Rotary Club or the Presbyterian Church ... it is still square because it is a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp of approved and established authority. There will even be certificates to hang on the wall."

The Zen of the old Chinese masters, says Watts, was wu-shih, which means "nothing special," or "no fuss." Bohemian affectations or monastery meditations are both forms of fuss, "and I will admit that the very hullabaloo about Zen, even in such an article as this, is also fuss--but a little less so."

Concludes Watts: "Having said that, I would like to say something for all Zen fussers, beat or square. Fuss is all right, too. If you are hung on Zen, there's no need to try to pretend that you are not. If you really want to spend some years in a Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you shouldn't. Or if you want to spend your time hopping freight cars and digging Charlie Parker, it's a free country. In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor worse;/ The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, some short"

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