Читать книгу Zen - Alan Watts - Страница 9

INTRODUCTION

THERE IS NOTHING THAT MEN DESIRE MORE than life — the fullness of life, Reality itself. In one form or another they try to possess it by every possible means, as happiness, as power, as joy, as wealth, as spiritual insight, and even as simple existence to which they cling with all their might for fear that it will be taken away. But one thing is certain: the harder you try to possess life, the faster it slips away from you, and the less you understand of its mystery. For life itself, whatever it may be, cannot be grasped in any form, whether of matter, of emotion, or of thought. The moment you try to hold it in a fixed form, you miss it. Water drawn from the stream is no longer living water, for it ceases to flow. This is what the Buddha meant in saying that the cause of all human misery was trishna or selfish craving, because trishna is the attempt to grasp life in some form, more especially in the form of one’s own personal existence. Man can only become alive in the fullest sense when he no longer tries to grasp life, when he releases his own life from the stranglehold of possessiveness so that it can go free and be itself.

In practice, almost all religions are attempts to grasp the mystery of life in either an intellectual formula or an emotional experience. Wherever it may be found, higher religion involves the discovery that this cannot be done, and that therefore man must relax his fearful grip upon life or God and permit it to possess him as, in fact, it does all the time whether he knows it or not. Zen Buddhism is a unique example of this kind of higher religion, and because the word “Zen” indicates this very spiritual state of full liveliness and non-grasping, it is really impossible to define Zen. Nevertheless, Zen has a philosophical and religious history by means of which we can arrive at some suggestion of its meaning.

As a specific form of Buddhism, Zen is first found in China, being the peculiarly Chinese version of the kind of Buddhism which, according to tradition, was brought from India by the sage Bodhidharma in or about the year 527 CE. Bodhidharma’s Buddhism was a variety of the Mahayana school, the Buddhism of northern India, which is to be distinguished from the Hinayana or Southern school of Buddhism now prevalent in Ceylon, Burma, and Siam. The latter is founded on the Buddha’s teaching as preserved in the scriptures of the Pali language, whereas the former recognizes, in addition to these, certain Sanskrit scriptures of supposedly later date which are of a deeply metaphysical character.