And then, of course, when I finally got serious about religion, there was D. T. Suzuki, the self-appointed professor of Zen for the West. His books have also receded, but for different reasons. His viciously anti-western attitudes are the flipside of the Japanese nationalism that wrecked havoc in the Pacific in the second quarter of the 20^th century. The same jingoism inspired his attempt to abduct Zen from the Chinese – his project to establish the unconditional superiority of Japanese Zen over the original Chinese Chan.

            But there are other reasons not only to reject D. T. Suzuki, but to root out his influence. Undoubtedly one is grateful to the professor for his promotion of Zen, since it brought the practice into the range of western intellectuals, just as one is grateful to Japan for the preservation of the tradition, however diminished. Perhaps we could say that the inherently paradoxical nature of Zen inspired it, but Suzuki’s interpretation split Zen, precisely, along intellectual lines. On the one side, he argued that Zen is essentially anti-intellectual, primarily geared to exploding the cognitive or rational mind. He acts as if this is the sole purpose of the Zen dialogue, the Zen koan. On the other side, his researches focused almost exclusively on the most intellectual aspects of the immediate Buddhist tradition which produced Zen, the late flowerings of the Mahayana sutra tradition, particularly the Flowery Garland (Huayan) Sutra, and the Prajnaparamita literature with the related Madhyamika (voidness or shunyata) philosophy.

            Recent discoveries and researches are showing the profound debt that Zen owes, in its emergence in China, to the contemporary Daoist traditions. Nevertheless, Chan or Zen is Buddhism, and Buddhism of a high order, experientially. One might describe it as a ‘puritanical’ restoration of Buddhism, a renewal that reaches back through to what is apparently the original impulse, although one finds that its face-to-face transmission may also involve a western element.

            But, if one were to characterize its ground, what it points to in its own tradition is ‘middle’ Buddhism, the transitional philosophy that eventuated in the full-blown Mahayana. In this middle period, Buddhism produces a subtle and complex, but specific, philosophy of self-awareness, apparently emerging out of the doctrine of the twelve-fold dependent origination. The doctrine tells us how the perceptual field is essentially self-dependent, emerging out of a self-sustaining pragmatic mutuality, and not from an ‘outside’ cause.

            The western ‘discovery’ of solipsism validates the necessity of such a description, although the western tradition has established the validity of cause in its own right. But, in a sense, a philosophy of reflection is the inherent corollary of an established ‘causality’, since it premises the descriptive interpretation which is the perceptual field. In the west, we can now establish such a philosophy on a purely cognitive basis. But Zen established it empirically from the relatively cognitive philosophical grounds of middle Buddhism.

            The problem is that a cognitive ground cannot establish the singularity of cause, because, in spite of its apparent nature in function, cause itself cannot be reduced to a unity. The grief of the 20^th century, whether in its wars or in its final cultural desiccation, can be largely assigned to the failed assumption of the essential unity of cause.

            At certain points in the not too distant past, it has been appropriate, in American Zen, to speak of the ‘two Suzukis’. In apposition to the intellectual / anti-intellectual presentation of Suzuki Daisetz, we have the pragmatic, but also essentially verbal teachings of Suzuki Roshi, Shunryu Suzuki. While undoubtedly Roshi’s American students will disagree with me about the ‘essentially’ verbal nature of his teachings, I am not altogether impressed with what I have seen of the first and second generation of disciples. He brought a peculiar light, but his light was grounded in an extraordinary document, the Shobogenzo of Dogen Zenji.

            At this point, the Shobogenzo, the ‘Treasury of the True Dharma Eye’, is the only piece of Japanese Zen that interests me.

            Students of Suzuki Roshi and their associates produced the first piece of literature that actually opened Zen to me, the Moon in a Dewdrop, a translation of selected tracts from the Shobogenzo. Here, for the first time, one could see the living paradox of Zen, not as the enemy of the cognitive, but as the ultimate extension of the cognitive when one recognizes that cognition itself is a form and function of ‘the spiritual’, the magical act at the center of self-awareness.

            ‘The green mountains are always walking. A stone woman gives birth to a child at midnight.’

            This is the nature of cognition that grounds poetry itself. The west has traditionally distinguished between poetic and analytical reason. But here is a document which shows that they are essentially the same.

            What the Shobogenzo showed me, finally, is that Zen is Chinese and not Japanese. If Dr. D. T. Suzuki is the scholarly epitome of modern Japanese Zen – and presumably he is – then even the transmission is suspect in my eyes. Like the late Korean students of Zen, Dogen captured the final reflective flowering of the Zen tradition in China, the historical summation of the classical period in Chan or Zen in which a renascent tradition produces exponents who summarize the voluminous records of the classical teachings and classical teachers – a paper compendium, which is simultaneously comprehensive and fragmentary. Comprehensive because an incredible range of the lineages is represented. Fragmentary because of the empirical and pragmatic nature of the teachings, almost entirely composed of immediate interactions between teachers and students, teachers and teachers, and students and students.

            But it also showed that the odd expressions are cognitive elements in a comprehensive cognitive whole. Contrary to D. T. Suzuki, the truth of the koan lies with the phrase of Miura and Sasaki, that the koan is the most economical expression of a given Zen fact or understanding.

            The period of classical Chan or Zen only lasted for two or three centuries in China. It coincided with one of the highest periods of classical Chinese culture, and helped feed back into a resuscitation of Daoism and Confucianism as well as a synthetic or syncretistic movement. But it endured a fairly extended period of decadence before the great koan collections were produced. And these collections themselves reflect a self-consciousness about the decadence as well as a new flowering of the tradition. But, of course, such a ‘flowering’, being reflective or retrospective, involves a subtly differing intent from the original impulses. Nevertheless, since we are outside both ‘classical’ periods, this is our necessary window. We need to find the borders in order to find the center.

            But even these collections, for the most part, remain out of context. Although the slashing brilliance of transmitting incidence had apparently subsided, a vast surrounding oral tradition remained. Most of the koan collections therefore remain intensely cryptic. Like many documents at the core of eastern traditions, they are more like lecture notes, peculiarly condensed. The teacher presenting the koans would use traditional recitations, anecdotes, scriptural references, and so forth, to locate the exchange and suggest its significance.

            The Shobogenzo, of course, embodies some of this context, which is what gave it much of its first force for me. But most of the other collections remained remote. Here, we take them, translated, off the bookstore shelves. We forget or ignore that these were once the in-house texts of a relatively small, remote and esoteric sect. Historically, in their own time, they would have only appeared in the frame that gave them flesh. And one wonders how many of the students would have actually handled the scrolls themselves. They are teachers’ documents. The presumptive presentation is oral.

            Thus far, it would seem that only one of these documents takes full account of this situation, and finally includes the context in the text. This, of course, is The Book of Serenity. Perhaps the glib eye can skate over a passage or two. But the text defies a linear reading. But the issue of importance here is the fact that the book consists in perspectives of awakening. Awakening itself involves a hierarchy, since light and darkness are each potential windows. But, since awakening is also whole and part, every individual is distinct, even in awakening. Awakening is not different from the individual nature, as much as a given perspective might be characterized by a generalization as well, since awakening, by definition, is also a ‘universal’.

            This is where Zen becomes the correlate for the next necessary step if the west wishes to return from the poisonous desert, the bodiless realm of negation it has fallen into. The fact that the single cause has fallen backward into its own emptiness, an emptiness which is nothing other than the denial aspect of our continued addictive clinging to the possibility of a causal One, means that the next step is the recognition of the multi-causal One. The One as obverse is the reverse of awakening. But the One of awakening invokes the wholeness and darkness prior to the One. The Light is grounded in the Darkness. Awakening emerges from any point on the wheel of Darkness. And, finally, the wheel of darkness is global. But the points gather. And the gathered points are causes. The apparently casual archetypes of the Zen story ultimately have an order, a causal succession. But, like the twelve-fold process of dependent origination, there are only causes, but no final cause. Or, rather, the Cause is the causal wheel, the turning points of awakening resolving into archetypes.