Modernist Zenism
The interest in Zen manifested of late years in the Western countries
has resulted from an understandable reaction against the coarseness and
ugliness prevalent in the world today, and also from a certain weariness
in regard to concepts rightly or wrongly judged to be inoperative; while
on the other hand people have tended to feel increasingly bored by the
habitual philosophical battles of words. Unfortunately, these justifiable
motives get only too easily mingled with anti-intellectual and falsely
'concretist' tendencies—this was only to be expected—in which
case the reaction becomes deprived of all effective value. For it is one
thing to take up a stand beyond of the scope of the thinking faculty and
another to remain far short of that faculty's highest possibilities even
while imagining one has transcended things of which one does not comprehend
the first word. He who truly rises above verbal formulations will ever
be ready to respect those which have given direction to his thinking in
the first place; he will not fail to venerate 'every word that proceedth
out of the mouth of God.' There is a rustic proverb which says that only
the pig overturns its trough after emptying it and the same moral is to
be found in the well-known fable of the fox and the grapes. If Zen is
less given to doctrinal formulation than other schools, this is because
its own structure allows it to be so; it owes its consistency to factors
that are perfectly rigorous, but not easily grasped from the outside;
its silence, charged with mystery, is quite other than a vague and facile
mutism. Zen, precisely by reason of its direct and implicit character,
which is admirably suited to certain possibilities of the Far Eastern
mind, presupposes so many conditions of mentality and environment that
the slightest lack in this respect jeopardizes the result of any effort
however sincere; at the same time we must not forget that a typical man
of the Japenese élite is in many respects a product of Zen. [The
Essentials Writings of Frithjof Schuon, p. 217-218].