In recent years, I've slowly transitioned from someone who was apathetic (if not a bit antagonistic) towards religion in my younger years to a more complicated place. I still wouldn't call myself a believer in any sense, but maybe it's a fact of aging that you notice how certain religious ideas are just *right* in a way that their secular equivalents just can't match. I think the last 10 or so years in the West have presented lots of challenges to the Good Ole Fashioned Liberal Mindset (GOFLM) that I and many of my ilk had previously ascribed to, as much as we may have denied that affiliation. At some point, humanity will have to come to terms with the fact that we can't know everything, and that actually, we shouldn't. I think the greatest block that the religious mindset sets out for this kind of person is that there are some insurmountable limits on life and society, and no matter how much "progress" we have, we won't over come them.
The Zen tradition offers lots of interesting ideas to someone caught at this intellectual crossroads. Whereas other religions might try to scare or threaten people into accepting their version of the limits on progress, Zen has no such aspirations. It encourages not only submission to the limits, but a kind of ecstatic appreciation of the beauty that comes from realizing the pitiful extent of which our attempts to control the world actually goes. The GOFLM has brought some freedom for some oppressed people, and has liberated the modern mind from much of the pointless self-flagellation that people in the past used to subject themselves to simply for being different. This "liberation" however has also done much to bound us up in ropes of our own weaving - we are so "conscious" of what we think is making us tick, and so beholden to the manipulative cries to "be ourselves" that we don't even realize that we are obsessing over a phantom.
Zen teaches us to stop spreading our ego out into the diaphanous wraith that tuggings of the world are constants trying to turn us into. When you clear the air of the smog of the past and the haze of the future, you realize that we've all become prisoners of time. I can't imagine what the writers and thinkers that formulated Zen a thousand years ago would think of the way the world has become even more obsessed with time, where so much is built upon clock-ins and clock-outs, chiming alarms, projections and analysis. Zen calls on us to recognize not only that we've become prisoners of time, but also that the prison is completely of our own making, and that with some reflection, it just might be possible to stroll right out of the cell without anyone to stop you.
This line of thinking is, of course, at odds with the reality of how our world is set up in 2023. One thing that makes this book special is the extensive space that Watts spends explaining how the precursors of Zen influenced it, especially Daoism. I remember reading the Dao De Jing in high school and feeling conflicted about a part where Lao Zi talks about how one should deal with an invading army. Lay down your arms, it says, don't resist. The Dao is moving and it is pointless to fight against it. This can feel like the kind of fatalism that comes packed into so many traditions of religious thought, a passivity anathema to the modern mind which is told that it is capable of anything. And yet to fight back is to propagate the violence that is counter to the goal that people actually want: peace. Zen might say that the injustices of the world today, which would seem to be a huge barrier to the kind of liberation from suffering that is its goal, are the result of everyone simply doing too much. To fight against what you see as wrong is also doing too much, just as those who are committing the wrongdoing are doing too much. The idea of a struggle is merely another endless chain of contingency, reliant to its core on false concepts of past and future that are lashing us to the wheel of suffering.
One cool thing about Zen that Watts devotes a whole chapter to is that unlike other religions, to be into the aesthetics of Zen is effectively to be into Zen itself. To ponder a work of a Zen master is to lean towards satori, to ape the Zen lifestyle is to be its most genuine practitioner. Thus, the Zen tradition again sets itself apart from other religious traditions that through ideas of conversion or faith merely bind themselves up in the cage of identity that brings us so much pain. ( )

Groundbreaking! ( )

LibraryThing Review:
Interesting even for someone who already knows a bit about Zen from other authors, with its description of the historical influence of Tao (and Confucianism) on the philosophy, and giving the reader a good idea of its paradoxicality. Perhaps the book could expatiate a bit on how it's understood and practised by common people, not just monks &c.


In his definitive introduction to Zen Buddhism, Alan Watts explains the principles and practices of this ancient religion to Western readers. With a rare combination of freshness and lucidity, he delves into the origins and history of Zen to explain what it means for the world today with incredible clarity. Watts saw Zen as “one of the most precious gifts of Asia to the world,” and in The Way of Zen he gives this gift to readers everywhere.

9788447347490

A lucid and refreshing book. ( )