Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen

by Alan Watts
Orignial version as published the spring 1958 issue of the Chicago Review
http://www.bluesforpeace.com/beat_zen.htm

It is as difficult for Anglo-Saxons as for the Japanese to absorb anything

quite so Chinese as Zen. For though the word "Zen" is Japanese and though
Japan is now its home, Zen Buddhism is the creation of T'ang dynasty
China. I do not say this as a prelude to harping upon the ncommunicable
subtleties of alien cultures. The point is simply that people who feel a
profound need to justify themselves have difficulty in understanding the
viewpoints of those who do not, and the Chinese who created Zen were the
same kind of people as Lao-tzu, who, centures before, said, "Those who
justify themselves do not convince." For the urge to make or prove oneself
right has always jiggled the Chinese sense of the ludicrous, since as both
Confucians and Taoists-however different these philosophies in other ways-
they have invariably appreciated the man who can "come off it." To
Confucius it seemed much better to be human-hearted then righteous, and
to the great Taoists, Lao-tzu and Chang-tzu, it was obvious that one could
not be right without also being wrong, because the two were as inseparable
as back and front. As Chang-tzu said, "Those who would have good
government without its correlative misrule, and right without its correlative
wrong, do not understand the principles of the universe."

To Western ears such words may sound cynical, and the Confucian
admiration of "reasonableness" and compromise may appear to be a weak-
kneed lack of commitment to principle. Actually they reflect a marvelous
understanding and respect for what we call the balance of nature, human
and otherwise-a universal vision of life as the Tao or way of nature in which
the good and evil, the creature and the destructive, the wise and the foolish
are the inseparable polarities of existence. "Tao," said the Chung-yung, "is
that from which one cannot depart. That from which one can depart is not
the Tao." Therefore wisdom did not consist in trying to wrest the good from
the evil but learning to "ride" them as a cork adapts itself to the crests and
troughs of the waves. At the roots of Chinese life there is a trust in the good-
and-evil of one's own nature which is pecularly foreign to those brought up
with the chronic uneasy conscience of the Hebrew-Christian cultures. Yet it
was always obvious to the Chinese that a man who mistrusts himself cannot
even trust his mistrust, and must therefore be hopelessly confused.

For rather different reasons, Japanese people tend to be as uneasy in

themselves as Westerners, having a sense of social shame quite as acute as
our more metaphysical sense of sin. This was especially true of the class
most attracted to Zen, the samurai. Ruth Benedict, in that very uneven
work hrysanthemum and Sword, was, I think, perfectly correct in saying
that the attraction of Zen to the samurai class was its power to get rid of an
extremely awkward self-consciousness induced in the education of the
young. Part-and-parcel of this lf-consciousness is the Japanese compulsion
to compete with oneself-a compulsion which turns every craft and skill into
a marathon of self-discipline. Although the attraction of Zen lay in the
possibility of liberation from self-consciousness, the Japanese version of
Zen fought fire with fire, overcoming the "self observing the self" by
bringing it to an intensity in which it exploded. How remote from the
regimen of the Japanese Zen monastery are the words of the great T'ang
master Lin-chi:

In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing
special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired
go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will
understand.

Yet the spirit of these words is just as remote from a kind of Western Zen
which would employ this philosophy to justify a very self-defensive
Bohemianism.

There is no single reason for the extraordinary growth of Western interest

in Zen during the last twenty years. The appeal of Zen arts to the "modern"
spirit in the West, the words of Suzuki, the war with Japan, the itchy
fascination of "Zen-stories," and the attraction of a non-conceptual,
experiential philosophy in the climate of scientific relativism-all these are
involved. One might mention, too, the affinities between Zen and such
purely Western trends as the philosophy of Wittgenstein, xistentialism,
General Semantics, the metalinguistics of B. L. Whorf, and certain
movements in the philosophy of science and in psychotherapy. Always in
the "anti-naturalness" of both Christianity, with its politically orderd
cosmology, and technology, with its imperialistic mechanization of a
natural world from which man himself feels strangely alien. For both reflect
a psychology in which man is identified with a conscious intelligence and
will standing apart from nature to control it, like the architect-God in
whose image this version of man is conceived. This disquiet arises from the
suspicion that our attempt to master the world from the outside is a vicious
circle in which we shall be condemned to the perpetual insomnia of
controlling controls and supervising supervision ad infinitum.

To the Westerner in search of the reintegration of man and nature there is

an appeal far beyond the merely sentimental in the naturalism of Zen-in the
landscapes of Ma-yuan and Sesshu, in an art which is simultaneously
spiritual and secular, which conveys the mystical in terms of the natural,
and which, indeed, never even imagined a break between them. Here is a
view of the world imparting a profoundly refreshing sense of wholeness to a
culture in which the spiritual and the material, the conscious and the
unconscious, have been cataclysmically split. For this reason the Chinese
humanism and naturalism of Zen intrigue us much more strongly than
Indian Buddhism or Vedanta. These, too, have their students in the West,
but their followers seem for the most part to be displaced Christians-people
in search of a more plausible philosophy than Christian supernaturalism to
carry on the essentially Christian search for the miraculous. The ideal man
of Indian Buddhism is clearly a superman, a yogi with absolute mastery of
his own nature, according perfectly with the science-fiction ideal of "man
beyond mankind." But the Buddha or awakened man of Chinese Zen is
"ordinary and nothing special"; he is humorously human like the Zen
tramps portrayed by Mu-chi and Liang-k'ai. We like this because here, for
the first time, is a conception of the holy man and sage who is not
impossibly remote, not superhuman but fully human, and, above all, not a
solemn and sexless ascetic. Furthermore, in Zen the satori experience of
awakening to our "original inseparability" with the universe seems,
however elusive, always just round the corner. One has even met people to
whom it has happened, and they are no longer mysterious occultist in the
Himalayas nor skinny yogis in cloistered zshrams. They are just like us, and
yet much more at home in the world, floating much more easily upon the
ocean of transience and insecurity.

But the Westerner who is attracted by Zen and who would understand it
deeply must have one indispensable qualification: he must understand his
own culture so thoroughly that he is no longer swayed by its premises
unconsciously. He must really have come to terms with the Lord God
Jehovah and with his Hebrew-Christian conscience so that he can take it or
leave it without fear or rebellion. He must be free of the itch to justify
himself. Lacking this, his Zen will be either "beat" or "square," either a
revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stuffiness and
respectability. For Zen is above all the Liberation of the mind from
conventional thought, and this is something utterly different from rebellion
against convention, on the one hand, or adopting foreign conventions, on
the other.

Conventional thought is, in brief, the confusion of the concrete universe of

nature with the conceptual things, events, and values of linguistic and
cultural symbolism. For in Taoism and Zen the world is seen as an
inseparably interrelated field or continuum, no part of which can actually
be separated from the rest or valued above or below the rest. It was in this
sense that Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch, meant that "fundamentally not
one thing exists," for he realized that things are terms, not entities. They
exist in the abstract world of thought, but not in the concrete world of
nature. Thus one who actually perceives or feels this to be so no longer feels
that he is an ego, except by definition. He sees that his ego is his persona or
social role, a somewhat arbitrary selection of experiences with which he has
been taught to identify himself. (Why, for example, do we say "I think" but
not "I am beating my heart"?) Having seen this, he continues to play his
social role without being taken by it. He does not precipitately adopt a new
role or play the role of having no role at all. He plays it cool.

The "beat" mentality as I am thinking of it is something much more

extensive and vague that the hipster life of New York and San Francisco. It
is a younger generation's nonparticipation in "the American Way of Life," a
revolt which does not seek to change the existing order but simply turns
away from it to find the significance of life in subjective experience rather
then objective achievement. It contrasts with the "square" and other-
directed mentality of beguilement by social convention, unaware of the
correlativity of right and wrong, the mutual necessity of capitalism and
communism to each other's existence, of the inner identity of puritanism
and lechery, or of, say, the alliance of church lobbies and organized crime to
maintain the laws against gambling.

Beat Zen is a complex phenomenon. It ranges from a use of Zen for

justifying sheer caprice in art, literature, and life to a very forceful social
criticism and "digging of the universe" such as one may find in the poetry of
Ginsberg and Snyder, and, rather unevenly, in Kerouac. But, as I know it, it
is always a share too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have
the flavor of Zen. It is all very well for the philosopher, but when the poet
(Ginsberg) says-

live
in the physical world
moment to moment

I must write down

every recurring thought-
stop every beating second

this is too indirect and didactic for Zen, which would rather hand you the
thing itself without comment.

The sea darkens;

The voices of the wild ducks
Are faintly white.

Furthermore, when Kerouac gives his philosophical final statement, "I don't
know. I don't care. And it doesn't make any difference"-the cat is out of the
bag, for there is a hostility in these words which clangs with self-defense.
But just because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no
need to say "To hell with it," nor to underline with violence the fact that
anything goes.

Now the underlying protestant lawlessness of beat Zen disturbs square

Zennists very seriously. For square Zen is the Zen of established tradition in
Japan with its clearly defined hierarchy, its rigid discipline, and its specific
tests of satori. More particularly, it is the kind of Zen adopted by
Westerners studying in Japan, who will before long be bringing it back
home. But there is an obvious difference between square Zen and the
common-or-garden squareness of the Rotary Club or the Presbyterian
Church. It is infinitely more imaginative, sensitive, and interesting. But it is
still square because it is a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a
satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approved and established
authority. There will even be certificates to hang on the wall.

I see no real quarrel in either extreme. There was never a spiritual

movement without its excesses and distortions. The experience of
awakening which truly constitutes Zen is too timeless and universal to be
injured. The extremes of beat Zen need alarm no one since, as Blake said,
"the fool who persists in his folly will become wise." As for square Zen,
"authoritative" spiritual experiences have always had a way of wearing thin,
and thus of generating the demand for something genuine and unique
which needs no stamp.

I have known followers of both extremes to come up with perfectly clear

satori experiences, for since there is no real "way" to satori the way you are
following makes very little difference.
But the quarrel between the extremes is of great philosophical interest,
being a contemporary form of the ancient dispute between salvation by
works and salvation by faith, or between what the Hindus called the ways of
the monkey and the cat. The cat-appropriately enough-follows the effortless
way, since the mother cat carries her kittens. The monkey follows the hard
way, since the baby monkey has to hang on to its mother's hair. Thus for
beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to
attain satori or to be anything but what one is. But for square Zen there can
be no true satori without years of meditation-practice under the stern
supervision of a qualified master. In seventeenth-century Japan these two
attitudes were approximately typified by the great masters Bankei and
Hakuin, and it so happens that the followers of the latter "won out" and
determined the present-day character of Rinzai Zen.

(Rinzai Zen is the form most widely known in the West. There is also Soto
Zen which differs somewhat in technique, but is still closer to Hakuin then
to Bankei. However, Bankei should not exactly be idenfitied with beat Zen
as I have described it, for he was certainly no advocate of the life of
undisciplined whimsy despite all that he said about the importance of the
uncalculated life and the folly of seeking satori.)

Satori can lie along both roads. It is the concomitant of a "nongrasping"

attitude of the senses to experience, and grasping can be exhausted by the
discipline of directing its utmost intensity to a single, ever-elusive objective.
But what makes the way of effort and will-power suspect to many
Westerners is not so much an inherent laziness as a thorough familiarity
with the wisdom of our own culture. The square Western Zennists are often
quite naive when it comes to an understanding of Christain theology or of
all that has been discovered in modern psychiatry, for both have been long
concerned with the fallibility and unconscious ambivalence of the will. Both
have proposed problems as to the vicious circle of seeking self-surrender or
of "free-associating on purpose" or of accepting one's conflicts to escape
from them, and to anyone who knows anything about either Christianity or
psychotherapy these are very real problems. The interest of Chinese Zen
and of people like Bankei is that they deal with these problems in a most
direct and stimulating way, and being to suggest some answers. But when
Herrigel's Japanese archery master was asked, "How can I give up purpose
on purpose?" he replied that no one had ever asked him that before. He had
no answer except to go on trying blindly, for five years.

Foreign relations can be immensely attractive and highly overrated by those

who know little of their own, and especially by those who have not worked
through and grown out of their own. This is why the displaced or
unconscious Christian can so easily use either beat or square Zen to justify
himself. The one wants a philosophy to justify him in doing what he
pleases. The other wants a more plausible authoratative salvation than the
Church or the psychiatrists seem to be able to provide. Furthermore the
atmosphere of Japanese Zen is free from all one's unpleasant childhood
associations with God the Father and Jesus Christ-though I know many
young Japanese who feel the same way about their early training in
Buddhism. But the true character of Zen remains almost incomprehensible
to those who have not surpassed the immaturity of needing to be justified,
whether before the Lord God or before a paternalistic society.

The old Chinese Zen masters were steeped in Taoism. They saw nature in
its total interrelatedness, and saw that every creature and every experience
is in accord with the Tao of nature just as it is. This enabled them to accept
themselves as they were, moment by moment, without the least need to
justify anything. They didn't do it to defend themselves or to find an excuse
for getting away with murder. They didn't brag about it and set themselves
apart as rather special. On the contrary, their Zen was wu-shih, which
means approximately "nothing special" or "no fuss." But Zen is "fuss" when
it is mixed up with Bohemian affectations, and "fuss" when it is imagined
that the only proper way to find it is to run off to a monastery in Japan or to
do special excercises in the lotus posture five hours a day. And I will admit
that the very hullabaloo about Zen, even in such an article as this, is also
fuss-but a little less so.

Having said that, I would like to say something for all Zen fussers, beat or
square. Fuss is all right, too. If you are hung on Zen, there's no need to try
to pretend that you are not. If you really want to spend some years in a
Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you shouldn't. Or if you
want to spend your time hopping frieght cars and digging Charlie Parker,
it's a free country.

In the landscape of Spring there is neither better

nor worse;

The flowering branches grow naturally, some long,

some short.