Zen deals with reality—the universe—as it is, and not as it is thought about and described. The heart of Zen is not an idea but an experience, and when that experience happens—and happens is just the right word—you are set free from ideas altogether. Certainly, you can still use them, but you no longer take them seriously.
Why should I share these Japanese novices’ lack of enthusiasm for Zen? I am sure that the paternalistic discipline with which it is forced down their throats connects it with the same emotions of guilt that I felt in the presence of God the Father and Jesus Christ. It would follow, then, that my enchantment with Zen and Buddhism is that their forms are, for me, free from this kind of static, and thus that through them I can approach the mysteries of the universe without having to feel like a small boy being bawled out because it’s good for him.
Our waking and attentive consciousness scans the world myopically—one thing, one bit, one fragment after another—so that our impressions of life are strung out in a thin, scrawny thread, lining up small beads of information, whereas nature itself is a stupendously complex pattern where everything is happening altogether everywhere at once. What we know of it is only what we can laboriously line up and review along the thread of this watchfulness.
My nervous system manages the multitudinous functions of my body, and the energy of the universe appears simultaneously in myriad patterns and forms, all working together in an ecological balance of unthinkable complexity.
Zen meditation is a trickily simple affair, for it consists only in watching everything that is happening, including your own thoughts and your breathing, without comment. After a while, thinking, or talking to yourself, drops away and you find that there is no self other than everything that is going on, both inside and outside the skin. Your consciousness, your breathing, and your feelings are all the same process as the wind, the trees growing, the insects buzzing, the water flowing, and the distant prattle of the city. All this is a single, many-featured happening, a perpetual now without either past or future, and you are aware of it with the rapt fascination of a child dropping pebbles into a stream.
Thus, “to realize Buddha in this body” is to realize that you yourself are, in fact, the universe. You are not, as parents and teachers are wont to imply, a mere stranger on probation in the scheme of things; you are rather a sort of nerve ending through which the universe is taking a peek at itself, which is why, deep down inside, almost everyone has a vague sense of eternity.
I wonder why it is that we can’t stop laughing at the notion that none of us really exist and that the walloping concreteness of all the hard facts to be faced is an energetic performance of nothingness.
It takes nothing to start something.
Life is a perfectly and absolutely meaningless happening—nothing but a display of endlessly variegated vibrations, neither good nor evil, right nor wrong—a display, though marvelously woven together, like a Rorschach blot upon which we are projecting the fantasies of personality, purpose, history, religion, law, science, evolution, and even the basic instinct to survive. And this projection is, in turn, part of the happening. Thus, when you try to pin it down, you get the banality of formal nihilism, wherein the universe is seen as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” .