Off-beat Zen
, I was exposed directly to the ideas of Zen Buddhism. I was suspicious at first, perceiving Zen
‘point’. Life was, in Zen parlance, yugen — a kind of elevated purposelessness
 This, too, is a typical Zen understanding — that life cannot be described, only
London. There, he heard the renowned Zen scholar DT Suzuki speak, and was introduced to him
, Watts published his first book The Spirit of Zen.
Everett, whose mother was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York. He married Eleanor in
— for instance, he dismissed the core Zen idea of zaZen (which meant spending hours seated
away,’ was his forgiving interpretation of zaZen. Slightly less forgiving was his comment on Western Zen
The uptight school … who seem to believe that Zen is essentially sitting on your ass for interminable hours.
wisdom, even from those who claimed to know Zen inside out.
metaphorical stick to whack yourself with is foreign to a Zen master
 Many Zen ideas have become debased into ‘new age’
beatniks and the hippies got hold of it, Zen philosophy, as described by Watts, was hard-
laughing. But most of the great sages of Zen have smiles on their faces, as does Buddha.
 Zen and Taoism are more akin to psychotherapy than to religion
snags, or double binds, according to Zen writings, produce inner tension, frustration, and neurosis
dukkha. Watts saw his job, via Zen philosophy, to teach you to think clearly, so
a difficult job on his hands — mainly because Zen and Taoism are so fundamentally counter-intuitive to the
 The riddles, or koans, that Zen thinkers speak in are intended to trip you up and
inner dialogue — are in making sense. Zen emphasises intuition and mushin, that is, an empty
away by your emotions, is foreign to a Zen master.
 Zen, after all, was used by the Samurai warriors
 Zen started as a reaction against the highly conventionalised and ritualised
 The word Zen is a Japanese way of pronouncing chan, which is
emptiness or void. This is the basis of Zen itself — that all life and existence is based
 The emphasis on the present moment is perhaps Zen’s most distinctive characteristic. In our Western relationship
between a vast past and an infinite future. Zen, more than anything else, is about reclaiming and
 For all Zen writers life is, as it was for Shakespeare,
your time thinking otherwise. Neither Buddha nor his Zen followers had time for any notion of an afterlife.
 Another challenge for Western thinkers when struggling with Zen is that, unlike Western religion and philosophy, it
 The Noble Truths are not moral teachings. Zen (unlike Mahayana Buddhism with its ‘Eightfold
shocking moral reasoning. When the American composer and Zen follower John Cage was asked, ‘Don’
 This encapsulates, and yet somewhat satirises the Zen world view — that the dark and the light
the idea that, for the accomplished follower of Zen, moralists are dangerous because they will destroy everything in
was not, admittedly, part of the Zen tradition, though he influenced it — puts the
This lack of a clear moral code is perhaps why Zen is not a philosophy wholly appropriate for the young or
the 1950s, Watts critiqued the Beatnik appropriation of Zen in his book Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen
 (1959). The apparent fatalism of Zen seemed to open the door for an individual to do
 In fact, Zen isn’t fatalistic. Rather, it accepts something
as both a particle and a wave. The Zen masters say the same thing about human life. Perhaps
 While it is refreshing that Zen philosophy is supported in many ways by present scientific knowledge
 Zen implies that this is like throwing the baby out with
is impossible, of course, to summarise Zen in a few thousand words. In fact it doesn
ask to be summarised. The first principle of Zen, voiced by the philosopher Lao Tzu, is 
those who say don’t know.’ Zen is not proselytising, quite the reverse. It asks
, and to tease it out. Another Zen saying is, ‘He who seeks to persuade
convinced me. After spending nearly two years studying Zen, Taoism and the works of Alan Watts, I
. All that time, Watts and the Zen idea were there in my head, informing my thoughts
I lose it. And, as the Zen saying instructs, if I see the Buddha, I