Publishing the same review in English for my English speaking friends.
I’ve just finished reading a book on Zen Buddhism and want to share my impressions. Spoiler: it’s actually much worse than I expected. Actually, Absolutely different (sorry for wordplay).
I started this book about a year ago but had to put it down. The material was too demanding, and I couldn’t handle it. These days my intellectual load is pretty low and mostly focused on practical tasks — how to resew this, how to fix that, how to scrub off a stain, how to cook something. So, against the odds, I finally made it through a book on Zen Buddhism. Well, almost made it — I’ve got 50 pages left, and I doubt anything revolutionary is waiting there.
Time for the first quote:
One Zen master answered the question "What is Zen?" like this: "Drink tea, eat rice, spend your time naturally, gaze at the ceiling, gaze at the mountains. What serene peace and feeling!"
But if it’s all that simple, why did the Japanese scholar and philosopher Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki write six hundred complex pages about it? And why did I even bother reading it?
I wanted to know how Zen Buddhism — not just Buddhism in general, but Zen specifically — answers the question that sooner or later everyone asks themselves: what is the meaning of conscious and free-willed human existence in this world? And what happens to humans after the body wears out and its mechanisms stop? Not because I personally lose sleep over this, but because I’m curious how different people come to terms with it.
The world’s major religions of the Book answer this question by bringing in a Creator or God who started the world, placed humans in it, made in His image and likeness, endowed with free will. We can use that will for good or evil, thereby determining our place in the afterlife. The idea is easy to get: earn yourself a decent eternal existence after death (possibly in union with God). On this foundation, people build sacred traditions, rules, principles, and so on. Whether a person is ready to accept such a framework is their own business, and in this post, I’m not trying to judge if it’s good or bad.
Zen, on the other hand, seems to get by without that kind of framework, and I wanted to understand how Zen practitioners manage. Around the word "Zen," of course, all sorts of associations float: emptiness, serenity, meditation, enlightenment, mindfulness, the ability to be content with little, etc. A person "who's got Zen" looks at life’s ups and downs with a smile and doesn’t let them cut deep. But popular associations can easily lie the essence. People lie about everything very easily.
I had a feeling that Zen might be close to the Christian idea of humility in the sense of "Thy will be done." That very thing I’m personally terrible at. It felt like there was something of that in Zen but simpler and more practical, clear for human mind. But that’s not the foundation of the system — more like a consequence.
When I started reading, I got the first, deceptive impression that Zen really is a very simple philosophy, accessible to everyone without special training, yet deeply satisfying when it comes to answering the Big Question.
"If there is something in our ordinary way of life that deprives us of freedom in the highest sense, we should strive to find what gives us a sense of perfection and satisfaction. Zen offers to do this for us and assures us that we acquire another worldview in which life takes on a fresher, deeper, and more satisfying aspect."
First, Zen has no theological or philosophical texts (except koans, but let’s not go there now — and they’re not theological anyway). Zen insists it cannot be expressed in words, so such things are pointless. "We fight because we disagreed about a passage from St. Augustine" © D’Artagnan — that can’t happen in Zen. Zen must be very simple and practical.
Second, Zen is based entirely on personal experience, so again, no complex philosophical systems. That is, Zen is personal experience. Experience and nothing more. Everything they use — meditation, koans, mondo, dead cats, stick hits, and all that wild stuff — is aimed at making that experience happen to a person, the experience that answers the Big Question. And yes, Zen does provide an answer.
I had an idea that Zen didn’t give an answer at all, that it claimed there was no answer, thus invoking humility.
"Truth be told, all sages since ancient times, since consciousness first awoke in the universe, have asked the same question over and over again — and what final answer can be given? What can be said except 'I don’t know'? That is truly the final answer regarding the mystery of the world."
I suppose that «I don’t know" is a very good answer. And it fits perfectly with humility and a practical philosophy for everyone, because if we don’t know, what else is there to do? Eat rice, drink tea, gaze at the mountains. Live an ordinary life.
"After all, in Ōbaku Zen, there is nothing special."
However, it’s not that simple.
Because that famous personal experience is called satori. And satori is a transformative experience that radically changes one’s consciousness, allowing you to feel like part of the Absolute and to let go of the sense of being a separate material unit in this world.
And here, from apparent simplicity, we go into mysticism. I learned that:
"Mysticism is a special way of perceiving the world based on emotions, intuition, and irrationalism. It assumes that true reality is not fully accessible to reason and is grasped not through logic or scientific methods, but through a special experience — a direct personal communion, merging with, or comprehending absolute truth, which in religions is often identified with God or the Absolute." (Wikipedia)
Later, Suzuki also says that Zen is a religion, and he’s right — because it’s really a search for an irrational experience of the supernatural. Zen is extremely far from materialism, and its answer to the Big Question is essentially this, in my own words:
A human being is part of the Absolute, not an independent unit, so there’s no need to invent concepts about the meaning of life or what happens after it ends. The meaning is simultaneously in everything and in nothing, and after death there will be everything and nothing — because everything and nothing are the same thing, namely the Absolute, or the Universe.
In Suzuki’s own words:
"When I am its wheel and turn with it, there is neither bondage nor liberation, for the wheel and I are one."
Neat, isn’t it? But honestly, it seems to me no better than the idea of a God who created everything and designed rules to transport people to eternal bliss or eternal torment after death. The principle is the same: even if you feel awful, it doesn’t matter. For Christians, Jews and Muslims — because only what comes after death matters. For Zen Buddhists — because you are part of the Universe, and it’s perfectly fine that you feel awful. Again, it might be that Christian God also fits into Zen, because everything is the Absolute — including God and his rules. Nirvana is the same as Samsara.
A few words about satori (turns out the stress is on the o).
I thought satori might be something like that state when you suddenly see a seed from a linden tree fall onto a bench by a fountain, and you completely stop thinking — because in that moment there’s only the seed, the bench, and the fountain. AI says that’s very close, but Suzuki would probably say no, too simplistic; after a strike on the head with a stick or a night spent in the snow in a monastery courtyard — that’s real satori. Besides, satori is supposed to radically change everything in your head, while a seed, a bench, and a fountain are just a momentary experience, even if vivid. But who are we to speculate about satori? Materialism clearly blocks our path to it.
Yet without satori, there is no Zen — because without satori, it’s all just intellectualizing, and intellectualizing has no place in Zen. But satori isn’t handed out for free; for an ordinary person, it means breaking the habitual pattern of logical thinking. To break that pattern, you need years of earnest seeking and spiritual work. Koans, mondo, dialogues with a teacher, meaningless tasks — all of that. And it’s a great feat for a person with Eastern thinking. For a Westerner, who holds individualism as the highest value, it must be almost unattainable, and it doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s all just pretense. Generating verbal absurdity is no great trick — practice a bit, and you’re good. Pretending you’ve Got It and then messing with others’ heads would be a breeze for a talented comedian or a sociopath. After all, there’s no way to verify it, since personal experience is the whole foundation.
There’s no humility here at all. Of course, not — the point is to feel yourself part of the Absolute. That’s no small thing! So, you can’t say that Zen Buddhism is about modesty, moderation etc. Vice versa: it's a great pride to be what they consider themselves.
To be honest, I wish D.T. Suzuki had written about all this a bit more simply. Maybe he’s addressing a different audience — after all, the book is nearly a hundred years old. Perhaps it’s written for people steeped in Christian culture with all its rituals, revelations, institutions, and so on. But if you don’t have that in your head, you don’t always understand what exactly he’s arguing with.
I confess: while doing some household chore, I also listened to a lecture by religious scholar Ivan Negreev, who laid out most of what I’d slogged through in the book in fairly simple terms in just an hour. Though maybe it only seemed simple because I’d already spent a long time grappling with Suzuki’s text. By the way, you can also ask an AI to explain the essence of Zen in simple words — it does a decent job.
To sum up: a good read, a strong intellectual exercise, but no great encouraging discovery.