Zen

A MIGHTY MAZE!
BUT NOT WITHOUT A PLAN
-- Pope

Many profess to abhor "organized religion," though they never refer to unorganized religion of which there is a great deal. Perhaps it would be clearer to say: Organized Religion on the one hand, and Spirituality on the other, (organized religion not being spiritual, and spirituality not being religion.) But here we are in a maze of words, the very thing we want to avoid.
"What can we reason, but from what we know?" continues Pope in his Essay on Man. But do we really know anything? The Poet continues: "Through worlds unnumbered, though the God be known, 'Tis ours to trace him only in our own." So the limitations are obvious. The mind retains certain impressions; but not everyone is capable of an excursion into infinity. Some people find moments of enlightenment in little things, a special transmission outside of Scripture. They seem unconcerned with "religion" and its disciplines. Such a man was R. H. Blyth. I met him in the summer of 1957 at the great Zen monastery atop Daiyuuzan in Japan where he came to lecture to Buddhist college students of English --the Young East, as they were called.
Mr. Blyth's field was English Literature or more properly, Zen in English literature. He had lived most of his life in the Orient and had been in a Zen monastery in Korea for sixteen years. Later, he removed to Japan, was married, and taught at the Peers College. At one time he had been the English tutor of Crown Prince Akihito but had been dismissed by the court on the fear that he was filling the Prince's mind with oriental ideas --a rash assumption. His chief occupation in his later years was studying and translating into English two Japanese verse forms, hoiku and senryu, and publishing several book on them.

From the time he arrived at the monastery he had the effect on the Japanese students and clergy of being the Pied Piper. They followed him everywhere. He lectured and conversed with them in Japanese and they doted on his every word.
He was a middle-aged, middle-class Englishman of medium stature wearing a sober blue serge suit and an inconspicuous cravat. He carried a well-worn leather briefcase stuffed with books and papers. He was completely modest and unremarkable except in the matter of speech. He ate the meagre fare of the monastery with relish. Though a vegetarian, he was known to eat buttered toast which delighted the Japanese since it confirmed their conviction that Caucasians are white because they ingest dairy products. He had a way of characterizing things with a dismissive phrase which you couldn't forget, even years afterwards: "Gibbon is all of a piece." In so far as the Japanese think at all, they do so concretely, intuitively, physically." To the question: but what is Zen? He would smile and answer, "I should slap you --but why bother?"

In his one-paragraph autobiography Blyth actually defines Zen as "what we hear in the music of Bach, which tells us that all things, including pain and death, that is, annihilation, come from the loving hands of God." He describes his progress through life as a journey or a Way, passing from animism to vegetarianism, haiku, Zen and senryu. He followed the way of Haiku, the purely poetical (nonemotional, non-intellectual, nonmoral, non-esthetic) life in relation to nature. After absorbing Zen through the books of Suzuki Daisetsu he arrived at the Way of Senryu, "an understanding of all things by laughing or smiling at them, and this means forgiving all things, ourselves and God included."
So an unorganized religion flares up briefly out of the noetic remains of two races strangely brought together in a moment of historical time. Does any of this matter? Consider these examples of the two Japanese verse forms

a haiku:

Buddha
Is the cherry blossoms
on a moonlit night

a senryu:

Far more difficult
Than the next life,
Is this one.

(Blyth's gloss: we have no time to spare to worry about a future
existence. As Thoreau said on his death-bed when asked about Heaven,
"One world at a time.")

[Dr. Daniel Pfeifer is a retired professor of Japanese Language and a past president of the Vedanta Society of Atlanta.]