So far the phenomenon called satori in Zen Buddhism has been treated
as constituting the essence of Zen, as the turning point in one’s life
which opens the mind to a wider and deeper world, as something to be
gleaned even from a most trivial incident of everyday life; and
then it was explained how satori is to come out of one’s inner life,
and not by any outside help except as merely indicating the way to it.
Next I proceeded to describe what a change satori brings in one’s idea
of things, that is, how it all upsets the former valuation of things
generally, making one stand now entirely on a different footing. For
illustrations, some verses were quoted which were composed by the
masters at the moment of their attainment of satori. They are mostly
descriptive of the feelings they experienced,, such as those by Bukko
and Yōdainen and Yengo and others are typical of this class, as they
have almost no intellectual elements in them. If one tries to pick up
something from these verses by a mere analytical process, one will
be greatly disappointed. The psychological side of satori which is
minutely narrated by Hakuin and others will be of great interest to
those who are desirous of making a psychological inquiry into Zen. Of
course these narratives alone will not do, for there are many other
things one has to consider in order to study it thoroughly, among
which I may mention the general Buddhist attitude towards life and the
world and the historical atmosphere in which the students of Zen find
themselves.
I wish to close this Essay by making a few general remarks in the way
of recapitulation on the Buddhist experience known as satori.
1. People often imagine that the discipline of Zen is to induce a state
of self-suggestion through meditation. This is not quite right. As we
can see from the various instances above cited, satori does not consist
in producing a certain premeditated condition by intensely thinking
of it. It is the growing conscious of a new power in the mind, which
enables it to judge things from a new point of view. Even since the
unfoldment of consciousness we have been led to respond to the inner
and outer conditions in a certain conceptual and analytical manner. The
discipline of Zen consists in upsetting this artificially constructed
framework once for all and in re-modelling it on an entirely new
basis. The older frame is called “Ignorance” (_avidyā_) and the new
one “Enlightenment” (_saṁbodhi_). It is evident therefore that
meditating on a metaphysical or symbolical statement which is a product
of our relative consciousness plays no part in Zen, as I have touched
on this in the Introduction.
2. Without the attainment of satori no one can enter into the mystery
of Zen. It is the sudden flashing of a new truth hitherto altogether
undreamed of. It is a sort of mental catastrophe taking place all at
once after so much piling of matters intellectual and demonstrative.
The piling has reached its limit and the whole edifice has now come
to the ground when behold a new heaven is opened to your full survey.
Water freezes suddenly when it reaches a certain point, the liquid
has turned into a solidity, and it no more flows. Satori comes upon
you unawares when you feel you have exhausted your whole being.
Religiously this is a new birth, and, morally, the revaluation of one’s
relationship to the world. The latter now appears to be dressed in a
different garment which covers up all the ugliness of dualism, which
is called in Buddhist phraseology delusion (_māyā_) born of reasoning
(_tarka_) and error (_vikalpa_).
3. Satori is the raison d’être of Zen, and without which Zen is no
Zen. Therefore every contrivance (_upāya_) disciplinary or doctrinal
is directed toward the attainment of satori. Zen masters could
not remain patient for satori to come by itself, that is, to come
sporadically and at its own pleasure. They earnestly seek out some
way to make people deliberately or systematically realise the truth
of Zen. Their manifestly enigmatical presentations of it were mostly
to create a state of mind in their disciples, which would pave the
way to the enlightenment of Zen. All the intellectual demonstrations
and exhortatory persuasions so far carried out by most religious
and philosophical leaders failed to produce the desired effect. The
disciples were led further and further astray. Especially when Buddhism
was introduced into China with all its Indian equipments, with its
highly metaphysical abstractions, and in a most complicated system of
moral discipline, the Chinese were at a loss how to grasp the central
point of the doctrine of Buddhism. Daruma, Yeno, Baso, and other
masters noticed the fact. The natural outcome was the proclamation
of Zen, satori was placed above Sutra-reading and scholarly discussion
of the Śastras, and it came to be identified with Zen. Zen therefore
without satori is like pepper without its pungency. But at the same
time we must not forget that there is such a thing as too much satori,
which is indeed to be detested.
4. This emphasising in Zen of satori above everything else makes the
fact quite significant that Zen is not a system of dhyana as practised
in India and by other schools of Buddhism than the Zen. By dhyana
is understood popularly a kind of meditation or contemplation, that
is, the fixing of thought, especially in Mahayana Buddhism, on the
doctrine of emptiness (_śūnyatā_). When the mind is so trained as to
be able to realise the state of perfect void in which there is not
a trace of consciousness left, even the sense of being unconscious
having departed, in other words, when all forms of mental activity are
swept clean from the field of consciousness which is now like a sky
devoid of every speck of cloud, a mere broad expanse of blue, dhyana
is said to have reached its perfection. This may be called ecstasy or
trance, but it is not Zen. In Zen there must be a satori; there must
be a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of
intellectuality and lays down a foundation for a new faith; there must
be the awakening of a new sense which will review the old things from
an angle of perception entirely and most refreshingly new. In dhyana
there are none of these things, for it is merely a quieting exercise of
the mind. As such it has doubtless its own merits, but Zen ought not to
be identified with such dhyanas. The Buddha therefore got dissatisfied
with his two Sankhya teachers, in whose teaching the meditations were
so many stages of self-abstraction or thought-annihilation.
5. Satori is not seeing God as he is, as may be contended by some
Christian mystics. Zen has from the very beginning made clear its
principal thesis, which is to see into the work of creation and not
interview the creator himself. The latter may be found then busy
moulding his universe, but Zen can go along with its own work even when
he is not found there. It is not depending on his support. When it
grasps the reason of living a life, it is satisfied. Hōyen, of Gosozan,
used to produce his own hand and asked his disciples why it is called
a hand. When one knows the reason, there is satori and one has Zen.
Whereas, with the God of mysticism there is the grasping of a definite
object, and when you have God, what is not God is excluded. This is
self-limiting. Zen wants absolute freedom, even from God. “No abiding
place” means that; “Cleanse your mouth even when you utter the word
‘Buddha’” amounts to the same thing. It is not that Zen wants to be
morbidly unholy and godless, but that it knows the incompleteness of a
name. Therefore, when Yakusan (Yüeh-shan) was asked to give a lecture,
he did not say a word, but instead came down from the pulpit and went
off to his own room. Hyakujo (Pai-chang) merely walked forward a few
steps, stood still, and opened his arms—which was his exposition of the
great principle of Buddhism.[5.43]
6. Satori is the most intimate individual experience and therefore
cannot be expressed in words or described in any manner. All that
one can do in the way of communicating the experience to others is
to suggest or indicate, and this only tentatively. The one who has
had it understands readily enough when such indications are given,
but when we try to have a glimpse of it through the indices given we
utterly fail. We are then like the man who says that he loves the most
beautiful woman in the world and yet who knows nothing of her pedigree
or social position, of her personal name or family name, knows nothing
of her individuality physical as well as moral. We are again like the
man who puts up a staircase in a place where four crossroads meet, to
mount up thereby into the upper story of a mansion, and yet who knows
not just where that mansion is, in the East or West, in the North or
South. The Buddha was quite to the point when he thus derided all
those philosophers and vain talkers of his day, who merely dealt in
abstractions, empty hearsays, and fruitless indications. Zen therefore
wants us to build the staircase right at the front of the very palace
into whose upper story we are to mount up. When we can say, “This
is the very personality, this is the very house,” we have the satori
interviewed face to face and realised by oneself. (_Diṭṭhe va dhamme
sayaṁ abhiññā sacchikatvā_.)
7. Satori is not a morbid state of mind, a fit subject for abnormal
psychology. If anything, it is a perfectly normal state of mind. When
I speak of a mental upheaval, one may be led to consider Zen something
to be shunned by ordinary people. This is a mistaken view of Zen,
unfortunately often held by prejudiced critics. As Nansen (Nan-ch‘üan)
declared, it is your “everyday thought.” When later a monk asked a
master[f124] what was meant by “everyday thought,” he said,
“Drinking tea, eating rice,
I pass my time as it comes;
Looking down at the stream, looking up at the mountains,
How serene and relaxed I feel indeed!”
It all depends upon the adjustment of the hinge whether the door
opens in or out. Even in the twinkling of an eye, the whole affair is
changed, and you have Zen, and you are as perfect and normal as ever.
More than that, you have in the meantime acquired something altogether
new. All your mental activities are now working to a different key,
which is more satisfying, more peaceful, and fuller of joy than
anything you ever had. The tone of your life is altered. There is
something rejuvenating in it. The spring flowers look prettier, and
the mountain stream runs cooler and more transparent. The subjective
revolution that brings out this state of things cannot be called
abnormal. When life becomes more enjoyable and its expanse is as broad
as the universe itself, there must be something in satori quite healthy
and worth one’s striving after its attainment.
8. We are supposedly living in the same world, but who can tell the
thing we popularly call a stone lying before this window is the same
thing to all of us? According to the way we look at it, to some
the stone ceases to be a stone, while to others it forever remains
a worthless specimen of geological product. And this initial
divergence of views calls forth an endless series of divergencies later
in our moral and spiritual lives. Just a little twisting as it were in
our modes of thinking and yet what a world of difference will grow up
eventually between one another! So with Zen, satori is this twisting
or rather screwing, not in the wrong way, but in a deeper and fuller
sense, and the result is the revelation of a world of entirely new
values.
Again, you and I sip a cup of tea. The act is apparently alike, but
who can tell what a wide gap there is subjectively between you and me?
In your drinking there may be no Zen while mine is brimful of it. The
reason is, the one moves in the logical circle and the other is out of
it; that is to say, in one case rigid rules of intellection so called
are asserting themselves, and the actor even when acting is unable to
unfetter himself from these intellectual bonds; while in the other case
the subject has struck a new path and is not at all conscious of the
duality of his act, in him life is not split into object and subject
or into acting and acted. The drinking at the moment to him means the
whole fact, the whole world. Zen lives and is therefore free, whereas
our “ordinary” life is in bondage; satori is the first step to freedom.
9. Satori is Enlightenment (_saṁbodhi_). As long as Buddhism is the
doctrine of Enlightenment as we all know from its earliest literature
as well as from its later one, and as long as Zen asserts satori
to be its culmination, satori must be said to represent the very
spirit of the Buddhist teaching. When it announces itself to be the
transmission of the Buddha-citta (_fo-hsin_) not dependent upon the
logical and discursive exposition in the canonical writings, either
Hinayana or Mahayana, it is by no means exaggerating its fundamental
characteristic as distinguished from the other schools of Buddhism
that have grown up in Japan and China. Whatever this may be, there is
no doubt that Zen is one of the most precious and in many respects the
most remarkable spiritual possessions bequeathed to Eastern people.
Even when it is considered the Buddhist form of speculative mysticism
not unknown to the West in the philosophy of Plotinus, Eckhart, and
their followers, its complete literature alone since the sixth
patriarch, Yeno (Hui-nêng, 637–713), so well preserved, is worth the
serious study of scholars and truth-seekers. And then the whole body
of the kō-ans systematically grading the progress of the spiritual
awakening is the wonderful treasure in the hands of the Zen monks in
Japan at present.