Word: zen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Floating on the Ocean. Watts feels that Westerners are attracted by Zen partly because it shuns supernaturalism. "In Zen the safari experience of awakening to our 'original inseparability' with the universe seems, however elusive, always just around the corner. One has even met people to whom it has happened, and they are no longer mysterious occultists in the Himalayas nor skinny yogis in cloistered ashrams. They are just like us, and yet much more at home in the world, floating much more easily upon the ocean of transience and insecurity...
...Westerner who would understand Zen, there is one prerequisite: "He must really have come to terms with the Lord God Jehovah and with his Hebrew-Christian conscience so that he can take it or leave it without fear of rebellion. He must be free of the itch to justify himself. Lacking this, his Zen will be either 'beat' or 'square,' either a revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stuffiness and respectability...
...Fuss. The Beat Generation have Zen wrong. "Because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say 'To hell with it,' nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes." Square Zen is just as far off the true beam. It is "the Zen of established tradition in Japan, with its clearly defined hierarchy, its rigid discipline, and its specific tests of satori." Though far better than "the common-or-garden squareness of the Rotary Club or the Presbyterian Church ... it is still square because it is a quest for the right spiritual...
...Zen of the old Chinese masters, says Watts, was wu-shih, which means "nothing special," or "no fuss." Bohemian affectations or monastery meditations are both forms of fuss, "and I will admit that the very hullabaloo about Zen, even in such an article as this, is also fuss-but a little less...
Concludes Watts: "Having said that, I would like to say something for all Zen fussers, beat or square. Fuss is all right, too. If you are hung on Zen, there's no need to try to pretend that you are not. If you really want to spend some years in a Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you shouldn't. Or if you want to spend your time hopping freight cars and digging Charlie Parker, it's a free country. In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor worse;/ The flowering branches grow...