The other day I asked a rōshi what he would do for the rest of the day (it was about three in the afternoon) if he knew he was going to die that night. Before he had time to answer I suggested he might listen to Bach’s music; or look at a collection of masterpieces of Occidental and Oriental paintings; or go next door and hold the baby while the mother went to the cinema. He answered that he would do zazen. On my suggesting that he might do something for humanity before he left it behind in all its confusion and misery, he said that his doing zazen would be of inestimable value to the whole world, far more than any acts of virtue could be. In support of this idea he gabbled off something from Dogen which I could not understand, but which I felt to be an argumentum ad baculum. This notion I had not heard before in Zen, though the Juzunembutsu, and the Protestant idea of the efficacy of prayer, and Roman Catholic prayers for the dead were of course familiar to me.

One other example, before I come to my thesis. I asked the rōshi, as I have asked several others, what was going to happen to him when he died. To make the answer easy for him, I told him how I had put the same question to a woman rōshi in Kyoto. She answered that she wasn’t going anywhere, and when I said I would go with her, she was very pleased, partly perhaps because she was a spinster of eighty who had obviously never yet been anywhere with a man. The rōshi, the man, I mean, agreed with this, and I supposed that he meant what I did, that death is the end of all existence of a personal kind, in other words, “There is no knowledge nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest,” but he then began to talk about transmigration, and how he would come back and go on doing zazen as before. Also, that Dogen and so on still existed in some way or other, so we make offerings to their spirits and ask for their assistance when in any kind of difficulty, spiritual or physical.

There are two points I want to make: first, that Zen must have nothing oriental or occidental, Buddhist or Christian, masculine or feminine about it; second, that only satori, that is, deep experience, is true.

To begin with the second point, the mistake we all make is to confuse what we know with what we don’t know. We know, for example, that the sun rose today, but we don’t know it will rise tomorrow. In England thirty years ago, famous cricketers used to be asked their opinion about the existence of the Deity, the idea being that a man who could hit eight fours and three sixes in one innings must also have theological, not to say mystical intuitions. This kind of mistake, which everyone makes, is also made by Zen-enlightened people. They do not distinguish what they know by enlightenment, and what they (think they) know by education, custom, personal prejudice and so on. Enlightenment does not reveal to us anything which happened in the past or which will happen in the future. Enlightenment is being caught up in this moment which is both in time and beyond time. In being beyond time it partakes of the past and the future, and with regard to events of the past and future we can, or should be able to, make better guesses, think more clearly about them, but that is all. Zen speaks only of this moment. Indeed, Zen is this moment speaking. Thus, if we are asked what will happen to us after death, Zen does not answer,—let us be more courageous, and say that Zen cannot answer, just as God cannot tell a lie.

Zen theory distinguishes between dai-ichi-gi, and dai-ni-gi, between the absolute and relative, and we may speak from either. For example, absolutely speaking, men and women are the same, and their enlightenment is the same; but relatively speaking, they are different, and their enlightenment is different. But Zen means speaking from both at the same time, and we must speak from both at same time all the time. Thus Zen cannot assert either the mortality or the im¬ mortality, the existence or the non-existence of the soul. Buddhism may do so, for it is a religion; Christianity may do so, it is a religion; Zen cannot so do, because it is religion itself, which deals with the infinite in this finite place, eternity at this moment of time, and cannot make general or abstract statements about any world to come or not to come. What answer shall we give then to the question, “Is there an after-life?” Thoreau’s is the most concise: “One world at a time!”

To come to the second point, there is nothing American (Christian) about this answer, and when a Japanese rōshi replies, he should reply in the same unjapanese way. Above all, we do not want the casuistry and sophistry of the double answer, that from the absolute point of view we are unborn and undying, as far as our real self is concerned; and from the relative viewpoint we are blessed or cursed with a succession of rebirths and redeaths. If I am asked the question (and I never am), I will say that, upon dispassionate inspection, the life of man looks like that of the plants, that grow, reach maturity, decay, and disintegrate into their various elements. This is doubtless the law for the so-called spiritual world, which actually is not separate from or even correlated with the material world, but is a mere aspect of it, just as the material world is a mere aspect of the spiritual. This answer, however, is not the kind of answer I give when asked about Bach’s Art of Fugue, or Basho’s Furu ike ya, or Shakespeare’s “Never, never, never, never, never.” It is only an opinion, and per se no better than anybody else’s.

Japanese people must read King Lear with all the depth and tragic integrity and poetry they can summon up. English people are to read Oku no Hosomichi with all the sublime simplicity and purity and religiousness they can muster. In the same way, Japanese Zen is to be the experience of Japanese people of their humanity, that is, the sound of water, the taste of tea, the bending of branches, the look of food on a plate, the realisation that all’s right with this terrible world. There is no superstition or dogma or provincialism, no wishful thinking, nothing that stinks of India or China or Japan here. The Zen which is the essence of Christianity must in the same way leave behind the Virgin Birth, the divinity of Christ, the existence or non-existence of God. These things may and should all be kept as symbols, not of ineffable mysteries, but of our own virginity, our own divinity, our own ex¬ istence, and our own non-existence.

Zen is the poetry of life, and all poetry is the same, all poetry is different. The joy at the sameness, the joy at the difference, this is ZEN. And beyond this there is doubtless another Zen, but the printer can’t print it, yet.