Alan Watts on Zen Buddhism

　　Once upon a time, there was a Zen student who quoted an old Buddhist poem to his teacher, which says

　　The voices of torrents are from one great tongue,

　　the lions of the hills are the pure body of Buddha.

　　"Isn”t that right

　　" he said to the teacher.

　　"It is," said the teacher, "but it”s a pity to say so."

　　It would be, of course, much better, if this occasion were celebrated with no talk at all, and if I addressed you in the manner of the ancient teachers of Zen, I should hit the microphone with my fan and leave. But I somehow have the feeling that since you have contributed to the support of the Zen Center, in expectation of learning something, a few words should be said, even though I warn you, that by explaining these things to you, I shall subject you to a very serious hoax. Because if I allow you to leave here this evening, under the impression that you understand something about Zen, you will have missed the point entirely. Because Zen is a way of life, a state of being, that is not possible to embrace in any concept whatsoever, so that any concepts, any ideas, any words that I shall put across to you this evening will have as their object, showing you the limitations of words and of thinking.

　　Now then, if one must try to say something about what Zen is, and I want to do this by way of introduction, I must make it emphatic that Zen, in its essence, is not a doctrine. There”s nothing you”re supposed to believe in. It”s not a philosophy in our sense, that is to say a set of ideas, an intellectual net in which one tries to catch the fish of reality. Actually, the fish of reality is more like water--it always slips through the net. And in water you know when you get into it there”s nothing to hang on to. All this universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it is changing. And when you”re thrown into the water after being accustomed to living on the dry land, you”re not used to the idea of swimming. You try to stand on the water, you try to catch hold of it, and as a result you drown. The only way to survive in the water, and this refers particularly to the waters of modern philosophical confusion, where God is dead, metaphysical propositions are meaningless, and there”s really nothing to hang on to, because we”re all just falling apart. And the only thing to do under those circumstances is to learn how to swim. And to swim, you relax, you let go, you give yourself to the water, and you have to know how to breathe in the right way. And then you find that the water holds you up; indeed, in a certain way you become the water. And so in the same way, one might say if one attempted to--again I say misleadingly--to put Zen into any sort of concept, it simply comes down to this:

　　That in this universe, there is one great energy, and we have no name for it. People have tried various names for it, like God, like

　　Brahmin, like Tao, but in the West, the word God has got so many

　　funny associations attached to it that most of us are bored with it. When people say "God, the father almighty," most people feel funny inside. So we like to hear new words, we like to hear about Tao, about Brahmin, about Shinto, and __-__-__, and such strange names from the far East because they don”t carry the same associations of mawkish sanctimony and funny meanings from the past. And actually, some of these words that the Buddhists use for the basic energy of the world really don”t mean anything at all. The word _tathata_, which is translated from the Sanskrit as "suchness" or "thusness" or something like that, really means something more like "dadada," based on the word _tat_, which in Sanskrit means "that," and so in Sanskrit it is said _tat lum asi_, "that thou art," or in modern America, "you”re it." But "da, da"--th…

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