The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

PREFACE
we understand intuitively that they explain in us phenomena otherwise
inexplicable.
All that I have just written deals with the fundamental
misunderstanding that we have to avoid. There are a certain number of
misunderstandings of less importance which we should now consider.
Very little will be gained from this book regarding it as a 'digest' that
seeks to explain to you 'what you should know concerning Zen'. To begin
with it is impossible to conceive of a 'vulgarised' treatment of such subjects;
no book will give a rapid initiation in Zen. And then, as a matter of fact, my
book is written for those who have already thought much on Oriental and far-
Eastern metaphysics, who have read the essential among what is available on
the subject, and who seek to obtain an understanding adapted to their
occidental outlook. My supposed reader should have read particularly The
Zen Doctrine of No-Mind of Dr. D. T. Suzuki, or, at least, the preceding
works of the same author. I do not pretend that my endeavours conform to a
Zen 'orthodoxy'. The ideas that I put forth therein have come to me in
espousing the Zen point of view as I have understood it through the medium
of the books that set it forth; that is all. Moreover it is impossible here to
speak of 'orthodoxy' because there is nothing systematised in Zen; Zen
compares all teaching with a finger that points at the moon, and it puts us
unceasingly on guard against the mistake of placing the accent of Reality on
this finger which is only a means and which, in itself, has no importance.
Nor do I call myself an 'adept of Zen'; Zen is not a church in which, or
outside which, one can be; it is a universal point of view, offered to all,
imposed on none; it is not a party to which one can belong, to which one
owes allegiance. I can help myself from the Zen point of view, in my search
for the truth, without dressing myself up in a Chinese or a Japanese robe,
either in fact or in metaphor. In the domain of pure thought labels disappear
and there is no dilemma as between East and West. I am an Occidental in the
sense that I have an occidental manner of thinking, but this does not hinder
me from meeting the Orientals on the intellectual plane and participating in
their understanding of the state of man in general. I do not need to burn the
Gospels in order to read Hui-neng.
It is because I have an occidental manner of thinking that I have written
this book in the way that I have written it. Zen, as Dr. Suzuki says, 'detests
every kind of intellectuality'; the Zen Masters do not make dissertations in
reply to the questions that they are asked; more often they reply with a phrase
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