Essays in Zen Buddhism : $b First seriesSuzuki, Daisetz Teitaro
Religion
Essays in Zen Buddhism : $b First series
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro
Zen Buddhism
As I conceive it, Zen is the ultimate fact of all philosophy and
religion. Every intellectual effort must culminate in it or
rather must start from it, if it is to bear any practical fruits.
Every religious faith must spring from it if it has to prove at all
efficiently and livingly workable in our active life. Therefore, Zen
is not necessarily the fountain of Buddhist thought and life alone;
it is very much alive also in Christianity, Mahommedanism, in Taoism,
and even in positivistic Confucianism. What makes all these religions
and philosophies vital and inspiring, keeping up their usefulness and
efficiency, is due to the presence in them of what I may designate as
the Zen element. Mere scholasticism or mere sacerdotalism will never
create a living faith. Religion requires something inwardly propelling,
energising, and capable of doing work. The intellect is useful in
its place, but when it tries to cover the whole field of religion it
dries up the source of life. Feeling or mere faith is so blind and
will grasp anything that may come across and hold to it as the final
reality. Fanaticism is vital enough as far as its explosiveness is
concerned, but this is not a true religion, and its practical sequence
is the destruction of the whole system, not to speak of the fate of
its own being. Zen is what makes the religious feeling run through its
legitimate channel and what gives life to the intellect.
Zen does this by giving one a new point of view of looking at things,
a new way of appreciating the truth and beauty of life and the
world, by discovering a new source of energy in the inmost recesses
of consciousness, and by bestowing on one a feeling of completeness
and sufficiency. That is to say, Zen works miracles by overhauling
the whole system of one’s inner life and opening up a world hitherto
entirely undreamt of. This may be called a resurrection. And Zen tends
to emphasise the speculative element, though confessedly it opposes
this, more than anything else in the whole process of the spiritual
revolution, and in this respect Zen is truly Buddhistic. Or it may be
better to say that Zen makes use of the phraseology belonging to the
sciences of speculative philosophy. Evidently, the feeling element
is not so prominently visible in Zen as in the Pure Land sects where
“bakti” (faith) is all in all; Zen on the other hand emphasises the
faculty of seeing (_darśana_) or knowing (_vidyā_) though not in
the sense of reasoning out, but in that of intuitively grasping.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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