‘Zen’: The Essence of a Philosophy
A review of ‘Zen’, by Alan Watts; New World Library, 2019.
Alan Watts was a self-styled ‘philosophical entertainer’ whose cut-glass English tones, I noticed some years ago, can be heard on certain trip-hop tracks. He is best known not for giving an intellectual gloss to artists like n u a g e s, however, but for helping to bring Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism to the West through his talks and books. His views were idiosyncratic; but broadly speaking they were Taoist in flavour. Watts thought that in the West we were too future-directed, controlling, serious and dualistic. He believed we should shed our conviction that the self was real, learn to let go of events, live in the present and, all in all, take life a bit less seriously. After all, he said, our existence was a ‘cosmic game’.
His views were idiosyncratic; but broadly speaking they were Taoist in flavour.
His slim book Zen: A Short Introduction chiefly deals with the tradition’s central message: that experience is preferable to analysis. We cannot understand Zen through words. We must practice it. For it is all about moving past conventional thinking, which assumes a world of categories. Watts tells stories and parables to illustrate his point. He relates koans — riddles whose answers arrive through insight, not reason. (The most famous is perhaps ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’) The job of the Zen master is to subvert expectations and the novice’s habitual ways of thinking. By doing so, he shows that novice that reality cannot be put into words. Bound up with this is the idea that we must abandon our ego, and a favourite past-time of the ego, which is attachment. The world is not black and white, good or bad. There is no self and other. There just is. Watts argues that Zen invites us to experience reality as it is, without the filters of the mind. Zen, he writes, is ‘the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being’.
He explores the notion of wu wei, which might loosely be translated as ‘non-action’ or ‘doing-without-doing’. It is not to do nothing, but to act in harmony with nature, without forcing things. He contrasts this approach to the Western tendency to overthink, analyse, control. Zen provides a stark, refreshing contrast, asking us not to think, but to be. Watts sets all this out with irony and humour, as if trying to shake the reader out of her usual mental patterns. Every joke, as Orwell tells us is, ‘resembles a tiny revolution’, a pleasing subversion of expectations.
It is a minor irony that so much ink has been spilled in the attempt to explain a tradition that is founded on the belief that words can only get us so far. Towards the end of Pablo d’Ors Biography of Silence, he expresses a frustration with words as he tries to explain even his experience of the inner silence that issues from meditation. Watts does not attempt a straightforward, logical description of Zen, but sets out ideas, questions, reflections and insights that invite us to let go of our typical habits of thought. This may leave you feeling enlightened (in the everyday sense) or frustrated. But at any rate, Watts does not provide instructions or answers. He writes in the Zen spirit of encouraging us to discover the truth through our own experience.
Watts does not attempt a straightforward, logical description of Zen.
Watts does not write in academic prose. He keeps things lively, playful, casual, as it were, as if having a conversation. The book meanders. We move from anecdotes about Zen masters to discussions of Eastern and Western philosophy. Watts does not wrap things up neatly. But that is the point. Zen is, I suppose, intended to be an experience: to give a taste of the tradition’s elusive, paradoxical character. By not explaining it, by eschewing logic and control and inviting us into the mystery, Watts tries to capture the essence of Zen. And we are left, if we are willing to embrace all of that, with an interesting journey into a different way, Watts would say a better way, of seeing and living.
