Zen take II 16 3 26 (17) 25 1 20
After introducing the subject of Zen in my blog of
16 3 19 the big surprise for me is that I am still reading the book: Zen and
Japanese Culture to the point I am almost 1/3rd the way through, something just
short of 500 pages in total of small text and even smaller, of miniscule
proportions text for footnotes... a book that one would discard as being too
repetitive were it not for the fact that the subject matter is so
difficult to grasp... and something therefore which fits well with a person who
didn't read his first work of fiction until the age of around 18!
To return to the "one central perception of
the truth of Zen, which is `the One is in the Many and the Many in the
One´" I quoted in my first blog, the author Daisetz Teitaro Susuki might
be said to labour the point but perhaps at last after reading the section
describing Zen and the Art of Swordsmanship I am beginning to grasp the
meaning behind this quotation..?
In the blurb to the book Suzuki is described as
Japan's foremost authority on the subject of Zen Buddhism, dying in 1966 aged
95, who was still visiting New York to attend conferences, etc., aged 94.
Given the fact he was a man of letters beginning his working life as a teacher
of English and writing over a hundred works on the subject of Zen who, in
between times from 1897 to 1908 moved to the United States to become an editor
and translator, he returned to Japan to become a Professor at Tokyo
University: all of which is to say a very different kind of person to me, and remarkable therefore that I have come thus far...
So to paraphrase, no doubt most ineptly, my
understanding of Zen is that it seeks to achieve an unconscious state of mind
whilst importantly retaining consciousness so that one's actions flow without
interruption essential in for example the art of the accomplished swordsman who
must exclude all thoughts of life and death from his thought processes whilst
engaged in the business of mortal combat: only then achieving victory. Still
later in the book he draws parallels between Zen and the Art of Bullfighting,
again where the successful bullfighter casts out all thoughts to do with what the
spectators watching are thinking, despite on occasion being gored, to
allow his unconscionable actions to flow and lead him through to victory…
In this way I was able to draw parallels between my
fighting days in the playground at primary and the first years of secondary
school, when in order to be successful one had to “first get one’s mad up” to
become this fighting man who just put all thoughts of getting hurt out of
one’s mind to flow onward to victory…
And like at school I was the guy who only ever
represented the school once in a an inter-school game of football when the team
was one man down and my name was drawn out of all the rest of the classes’
names being put into a hat to select the 11th man, me as left-back!
But a few years later got to represent the school in my own right in the school
Chess Team!
I then got to thinking of all the steps which
determined that I chose the Sciences for my profession and the
steps that determined I should become a leader of men: fortuitously having an
older brother who had no ambition to lead but didn’t mind my leading him, and
how all these things came about without essentially planning or being conscious
of planning any of it? And how so often I scored over the more politically
astute among my colleagues, because I clung to the principles of my science
without attempting to bend the rules to my own advantage… So that now as “an old
person with a space of his own weaving a beautiful old-age” to quote again from Xinran’s ”The Good Women
of China” I feel I am maybe at last making some sense of this once awful
business of being retired..? Who knows will I one day succeed..? Have a good day
everyone as I hope my blogs are not becoming too esoteric for you my precious
readership..? hahaha!
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