..续本文上一页 Why, Why, Why

　　 Why did God make the universe

　　 Who made God

　　 Why are the trees green

　　" and so on and so forth, and father says finally, "Oh, shut up and eat your bun." It isn”t quite like that, because, you see, the thing is this:

　　All those people who try to realize Zen by doing nothing about it are still trying desperately to find it, and they”re on the wrong track. There is another Zen poem which says, "You cannot attain it by thinking, you cannot grasp it by not thinking." Or you could say, you cannot catch hold of the meaning of Zen by doing something about it, but equally, you cannot see into its meaning by doing nothing about it, because both are, in their different ways, attempts to move from where you are now, here, to somewhere else, and the point is that we come to an understanding of this, what I call suchness, only through being completely here. And no means are necessary to be completely here. Neither active means on the one hand, nor passive means on the other. Because in both ways, you are trying to move away from the immediate now. But you see, it”s difficult to understand language like that. And to understand what all that is about, there is really one absolutely necessary prerequisite, and this is to stop thinking. Now, I am not saying this in the spirit of being an anti-intellectual, because I think a lot, talk a lot, write a lot of books, and am sort of a half-baked scholar. But you know, if you talk all the time, you will never hear what anybody else has to say, and therefore, all you”ll have to talk about is your own conversation. The same is true for people who think all the time. That means, when I use the word "think," talking to yourself, subvocal conversation, the constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull. Now, if you do that all the time, you”ll find that you”ve nothing to think about except thinking, and just as you have to stop talking to hear what I have to say, you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about. And the moment you stop thinking, you come into immediate contact with what Korzybski called, so delightfully, "the unspeakable world," that is to say, the nonverbal world. Some people would call it the physical world, but these words "physical," "nonverbal," "material" are all conceptual, and bangs stick on the floorÙ is not a concept. It”s not a noise, either. It”s Bangs stick againÙ. Get that

　　 So when you are awake to that world, you suddenly find that all the so-called differences between self and other, life and death, pleasure and pain, are all conceptual, and they”re not there. They don”t exist at all in that world which is bangs stickÙ. In other words, if I hit you hard enough, "ouch" doesn”t hurt, if you”re in a state of what is called no-thought. There is a certain experience, you see, but you don”t call it "hurt." It”s like when you were small children, they banged you about, and you cried, and they said "Don”t cry" because they wanted to make you hurt and not cry at the same time. People are rather curious about the things the do like that. But you see, they really wanted you to cry, the same way if you threw up one day. It”s very good to throw up if you”ve eaten soemthing that isn”t good for you, but your mother said "Eugh!" and made you repress it and feel that throwing up wasn”t a good thing to do. Because then when you saw people die, and everybody around you started weeping and making a fuss, and then you learned from that that dying was terrible. When somebody got sick, everybody else got anxious, and you learned that getting sick was something awful. You learned it from a concept.

　　So the reason why there is in the practice of Zen, what we did before this lecture began, to practice Za-zen, si…

《Alan Watts on Zen Buddhism》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…