..续本文上一页tting Zen. Incidentally, there are three other kinds of Zen besides Za-zen. Standing Zen, walking Zen, and lying Zen. In Buddhism, they speak of hte three dignities of man. Walking, standing, sitting, and lying. And they say when you sit, just sit. When you walk, just walk. But whatever you do, don”t wobble. In fact, of course, you can wobble, if you really wobble well. When the old master *Hiakajo was asked "What is Zen

　　" he said "When hungry, eat, when tired, sleep," and they said, "Well isn”t that what everybody does

　　 Aren”t you just like ordinary people

　　" "Oh no," he said, "they don”t do anything of the kind. When they”re hungry, they don”t just eat, they think of all sorts of things. When they”re tired, they don”t just sleep, but dream all sorts of dreams." I know the Yun-Mens won”t like that, but there comes a time when you just dream yourself out, and no more dreams. You sleep deeply and breathe from your heels. Now, therefore, Za-zen, or sitting Zen, is a very, very good thing in the Western world. We have been running around far too much. It”s all right; we”ve been active, and our action has achieved a lot of good things. But as Aristotle pointed out long ago--and this is one of the good things about Aristotle. He said "the goal of action is contemplation." In other words, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, but what”s it all about

　　 Especially when people are busy because they think they”re GOING somewhere, that they”re going to get something and attain something. There”s quite a good deal of point to action if you know you”re not going anywhere. If you act like you dance, or like you sing or play music, then you”re really not going anywhere, you”re just doing pure action, but if you act with a thought in mind that as a result of action you are eventually going to arrive at someplace where everything will be alright. Then you are on a squirrel cage, hopelessly condemned to what the Buddhists call _samsara_, the round, or rat-race of birth and death, because you think you”re going to go somewhere. You”re already there. And it is only a person who has discovered that he is already there who is capable of action, because he doesn”t act frantically with the thought that he”s going to get somewhere. He acts like he can go into walking meditation at that point, you see, where we walk not because we are in a great, great hurry to get to a destination, but because the walking itself is great. The walking itself is the meditation. And when you watch Zen monks walk, it”s very fascinating. They have a different kind of walk from everybody else in Japan. Most Japanese shuffle along, or if they wear Western clothes, they race and hurry like we do. Zen monks have a peculiar swing when they walk, and you have the feeling they walk rather the same way as a cat. There”s something about it that isn”t hesitant; they”re going along all right, they”re not sort of vagueing around, but they”re walking just to walk. And that”s walking meditation. But the point is that one cannot act creatively, except on the basiss of stillness. Of having a mind that is capable from time to time of stopping thinking. And so this practice of sitting may seem very difficult at first, because if you sit in the Buddhist way, it makes your legs ache. Most Westerners start to fidget; they find it very boring to sit for a long time, but the reason they find it boring is that they”re still thinking. If you weren”t thinking, you wouldn”t notice the passage of time, and as a matter of fact, far from being boring, the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named, and saying "that”s a shadow, that”s red, that”s brown, th…

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