ALAN WATTS: LECTURE ON ZEN BUDDHISM
 
Once upon a time, there was a Zen student who quoted an old Buddhist
poem to his teacher, which says
 
The voices of torrents are from one great tongue,
the lions of the hills are the pure body of Buddha.
"Isn't that right?" he said to the teacher.
"It is," said the teacher, "but it's a pity to say so."
 
It would be, of course, much better, if this occasion were
celebrated with no talk at all, and if I addressed you in the manner
of the ancient teachers of Zen, I should hit the microphone with my
fan and leave. But I somehow have the feeling that since you have
contributed to the support of the Zen Center, in expectation of
learning something, a few words should be said, even though I warn
you, that by explaining these things to you, I shall subject you to
a very serious hoax. Because if I allow you to leave here this
evening, under the impression that you understand something about
Zen, you will have missed the point entirely. Because Zen is a way
of life, a state of being, that is not possible to embrace in any
concept whatsoever, so that any concepts, any ideas, any words that
I shall put across to you this evening will have as their object,
showing you the limitations of words and of thinking.
 
Now then, if one must try to say something about what Zen is, and I
want to do this by way of introduction, I must make it emphatic that
Zen, in its essence, is not a doctrine. There's nothing you're
supposed to believe in. It's not a philosophy in our sense, that is
to say a set of ideas, an intellectual net in which one tries to
catch the fish of reality. Actually, the fish of reality is more
like water--it always slips through the net. And in water you know
when you get into it there's nothing to hang on to. All this
universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it is
changing. And when you're thrown into the water after being
accustomed to living on the dry land, you're not used to the idea of
swimming. You try to stand on the water, you try to catch hold of
it, and as a result you drown. The only way to survive in the water,
and this refers particularly to the waters of modern philosophical
confusion, where God is dead, metaphysical propositions are
meaningless, and there's really nothing to hang on to, because we're
all just falling apart. And the only thing to do under those
circumstances is to learn how to swim. And to swim, you relax, you
let go, you give yourself to the water, and you have to know how to
breathe in the right way. And then you find that the water holds you
up; indeed, in a certain way you become the water. And so in the
same way, one might say if one attempted to--again I say
misleadingly--to put Zen into any sort of concept, it simply comes
down to this: