..续本文上一页 "A reed has grown piercing through the leg".

　　 "Here goes a man with the chest exposed

　　 and the legs all naked".

　　These are culled at random from a few books I am using for the purpose. When a thorough systematic search is made in the entire body of Zen literature we get quite a collection of strange statements ever made concerning such a simple question as, "Who is the Buddha

　　" Some of the answers given above are altogether irrelevant; they are, indeed, far from being appropriate so far as we judge them from our ordinary standard of reasoning. The other seem to be making sport of the question or of the questioner himself. Can the Zen masters who make such remarks be considered to be in earnest and really desiring the Enlightenment of their followers

　　 But the point is to have our minds work in complete union with the state of mind in which the masters uttered these strange words. When this is done, every one of these answers appears in an altogether new light and becomes wonderfully transparent.

　　Being practical and directly to the point, Zen never wastes time or words in explanation. Its answers are always curt and pithy; there is nothing circumlocutory in Zen; the master”s words come out spontaneously and without a moment”s delay. A gong is struck and its vibrations instantly follow. If we are not on the alert we fail to catch them; a mere winking and we miss the mark forever. They justly compare Zen to lightning. The rapidity, however, does not constitute Zen; its naturalness, its freedom from artificialities, its being expressive of life itself, its originality -- these are the essential characteristics of Zen. Therefore, we have always to be on guard not to be carried away by outward signs when we really desire to get into the core of Zen. How difficult and misleading it would be to try and understand Zen literally and logically, depending on those statements which have been given above as answers to the question "What is Buddha

　　" Of course, so far as they are given as answers they are pointers by which we may know where to look for the presence of the Buddha; but we must remember that the finger pointing at the moon remains a finger and under no circumstances can it be changed into the moon itself. Danger always lurks where the intellect slyly creeps in and takes the index for the moon itself.

　　Yet there are philosophers who, taking some of the above utterances in their literary and logical sense, try to see something of pantheism in them. For instance, when the master says, "Three pounds of flax", or "A dirt-scraper", by this is apparently meant, they would insist, to convey the pantheistic idea. That is to say that those Zen masters consider the Buddha to be manifesting himself in everything: in the flax, in the piece of wood, in the running stream, in the towering mountains, or in works of art. Mahayana Buddhism, especially Zen, seems to indicate something of the spirit of pantheism, but nothing is in fact farther from Zen than this representation. The masters from the beginning have foreseen this dangerous tendency, and that is why they make those apparently incoherent statements. Their inclination is to set the minds of their disciples or of scholars free from being oppressed by any fixed opinion or prejudices or so-called logical interpretations. When Tozan answered, "Three pounds of flax", to the question, "What is the Buddha

　　" -- which, in the way, is the same thing as asking, "What is God

　　" -- he did not mean that the flax he might have been handling at the time was a visible manifestation of Buddha, that Buddha when seen with an eye of intelligence could be met within every object. His answer simply was, "Three pounds of flax". He did not imply anything metaphysical in this plain matter-of-fact uttera…

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