ZenExperience-obooko-rel0025

None of these things is taught explicitly in Zen. Instead they
are discovered waiting in our consciousness after all else has
been swept away. A scornful twelfth-century Chinese scholar
summarized the Zen method as follows: "Since the Zen masters
never run the risk of explaining anything in plain language, their
followers must do their own pondering and puzzling—from which a
real threshing-out results." In these pages we will watch the
threshing-out of Zen itself—as its masters unfold a new realm of
consciousness, the Zen experience.
TAOISM: THE WAY TO ZEN
Taoism is the original religion of ancient China. It is founded on
the idea that a fundamental principle, the Tao, underlies all
nature. Long before the appearance of Zen, Taoists were
teaching the superiority of intuitive thought, using an antiintellectualism
that often ridiculed the logic-bound limitations of
conventional Chinese life and letters. However, Taoism was
always upbeat and positive in its acceptance of reality, a quality
that also rubbed off on Zen over the centuries. Furthermore, many
Taoist philosophers left writings whose world view seems almost
Zen-like. The early Chinese teachers of meditation (called dhyana
in Sanskrit and Ch'an in Chinese) absorbed the Taoist tradition of
intuitive wisdom, and later Zen masters often used Taoist
expressions. It is fitting, therefore, that we briefly meet some of
the most famous teachers of Chinese Taoism.
LAO TZU
One of the most influential figures in ancient Chinese lore is
remembered today merely as Lao Tzu (Venerable Master). Taoist
legends report he once disputed (and bettered) the scholarly
Confucius, but that he finally despaired of the world and rode an
oxcart off into the west, pausing at the Han-ku Pass—on the
insistence of its keeper—to set down his insights in a fivethousand-character
poem. This work, the Tao Te Ching (The Way
and the Power), was an eloquent, organized, and lyrical
statement of an important point of view in China of the sixth
century B.C., an understanding later to become an essential
element of Ch'an Buddhism.
The word "Tao" means many, many things—including the elan
vital or life force of the universe, the harmonious structuring of