observing the self" by bringing it to anintensity in which it exploded. How remote from the regimen of the JapaneseZen monastery are the words of the great T'ang master Lin-chi:In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary andnothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and whenyou're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wisewill understand.Yet the spirit of these words is just as remote from a kind of Western Zenwhich would employ this philosophy to justify a very self-defensiveBohemianism.There is no single reason for the extraordinary growth of Western interestin Zen during the last twenty years. The appeal of Zen arts to the "modern"spirit in the West, the work of Suzuki, the war with Japan, the itchyfascination of "Zen-stories," and the attraction of a non-conceptual,experiential philosophy in the climate of scientific relativism--all theseare involved. One might mention, too, the affinities between Zen and suchpurely Western trends as the philosophy of Wittgenstein, Existentialism,General Semantics, the metalinguistics of B. L. Whorf, and certainmovements in the philosophy of science and in psychotherapy. Always in thebackground there is our vague disquiet with the artificiality or"anti-naturalness" of both Christianity, with its politically-orderedcosmology, and technology, with its imperialistic mechanization of anatural world from which man himself feels strangely alien. For bothreflect a psychology in which man is identified with a consciousintelligence and will standing apart from nature to control it, like thearchitect-God in whose image this version of man is conceived. The disquietarises from the suspicion that our attempt to master the world from outsideis a vicious circle in which we shall be condemned to the perpetualinsomnia of controlling controls and supervising supervision ad infinitum.To the Westerner in search of the reintegration of man and nature there isan appeal far beyond the merely sentimental in the naturalism of Zen--inthe landscapes of Ma-yuan and Sesshu, in an art which is simultaneouslyspiritual and secular, which conveys the mystical in terms of the natural,and which, indeed, never even imagined a break between them. Here is a viewof the world imparting a profoundly refreshing sense of wholeness to aculture in which the spiritual and the material, the conscious and theunconscious, have been cataclysmically split. For this reason the Chinesehumanism and naturalism of Zen intrigue us much more strongly than IndianBuddhism or Vedanra. These, too, have their students in the West, but theirfollowers seem for the most part to be displaced Christians--people insearch of a more plausible philosophy than Christian supernaturalism tocarry on the essentially Christian search for the miraculous. The ideal manof Indian Buddhism is clearly a superman, a yogi with absolute mastery ofhis own nature, according perfectly with the science-fiction ideal of "menbeyond mankind." But the Buddha or awakened man of Chinese Zen is "ordinaryand nothing special"; he is humorously human like the Zen tramps portrayedby Mu-chi and Liang-k'ai. We like this because here, for the first time, isa conception of the holy man and sage who is not impossibly remote, notsuperhuman but fully human, and, above all, not a solemn and sexlessascetic. Furthermore, in Zen the satori