There is some evocative and challenging writing in this book! Suzuki transcribes a letter written by a Zen abbot Takuan Sōhō (1573-1645) to Yagyū Tajima no Kami. Here's an interesting excerpt from that letter:
...The mind is not to be treated like a cat tied to a string. The mind must be left to itself, utterly free to move about according to its own nature. Not to localize or partialize it is the end [goal] of spiritual training. When it is nowhere it is everywhere. When it occupies one tenth, it is absent in the other nine tenths. Let the swordsman discipline himself to have the mind go on its own way, instead of trying deliberately to confine it somewhere.
The main thesis of Takuan's letter to Yagyū Tajima no Kami is almost exhausted in the passages translated more or less literally above. It consists in preserving the absolute fluidity of the mind (kokoru) by keeping it free from the intellectual deliberations and affective disturbances of any kind at all that may arise from Ignorance and Delusion. The fluidity of mind and Prajñā Immovable may appear contradictory, but in actual life they are identical. When you have one, you have the other, for the Mind in its suchness is at once movable and immovable, it is constantly flowing, never 'stopping' at any point, and yet there is in it a centre never subject to any kind of movement, remaining forever one and the same. The difficulty is how to identify this centre of immovability with its never-stopping movements themselves. Takuan advises the swordsman to solve the difficulty in the use of his sword as he actually stands against his opponent. The swordsman is thus made to be constantly faced with a logical contradiction. As long as he notices it, ,that is as long as he is logically minded, he finds his movements always hampered in one way or another — which is suki [literally means any space between two objects where something else can enter - a psychological or mental suki is created when a state of tension is relaxed - footnote16], and the enemy is sure to avail himself of it. Therefore, the swordsman cannot afford to indulge in idle intellectual employment when the other side is always on the alert to detect the slightest suki produced on your part. You cannot relax and yet keep the state of tension deliberately for any length of time. For this is what makes the mind 'stop' and lose its fluidity. How then can one have relaxation and tension simultaneously? Here is the same old contradiction, though presented in a different form (107-9).
What struck me as I was transcribing this — but which didn't when I first read it — is the caution it is suggesting
in our use of logic to solve living problems. Is it absolutely true that to be fully alive means living with a 'relaxed-tension' between two mutually opposed states? Hmmm. What does this mean for trying to solve, with intellectual logic only, problems with seemingly opposed solutions? My experience within a bureaucratic corporation is that the circumscribed logic of accountancy and MBAs that is being applied liberally is killing the company much like the medicine 'logic' of blood-letting killed Lord Byron. How did a friend put it? 'To save an airline, a consortium of accountants would look to reduce costs and so fire all the pilots and stop buying fuel.'
And it seems to me that this relates to one of the key principles in Jung's ideas about a healthy balanced life requires a reconciliation between the opposites via some kind of transcendent experience as described in Symbols of Transformation and elsewhere.
Just a thought.
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