Comments on Zen in The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen

34-35
[44] The search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched. One turns in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home. (“But you are home,” cries the Witch of the North. “All you have to do is wake up!”) The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of “ideas,” of fears and defenses, [45] prejudices and repressions. The holy grail is what Zen Buddhists call our own “true nature”; each man is his own savior after all.
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[61] Our speculations about the Crystal Monastery have led inevitably to talk of Buddhism and Zen. Last year, as a way of alerting GS to my unscientific preoccupations, I sent him a small book entitled Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Very politely, he had written, "Many thanks for the Zen book, which Kay brought with her to Pakistan. I've only browsed a bit so far. A lot of it seems most sensible, some of it less so, but I have to ponder things some more." GS refuses to believe that the Western mind can truly absorb nonlinear Eastern perceptions; he shares the view of many in the West that Eastern thought evades "reality" and therefore lacks the courage of existence. But the courage-to-be, right here and now and nowhere else, is precisely what Zen, at least, demands: eat when you eat, sleep when you sleep! Zen has no patience with “mysticism,” far less the occult, although its emphasis on the enlightenment experience (called kensho or satori) is what sets it apart from other religions and philosophies.

I remind GS of the Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhardt and Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, and Saint Catherine of Siena, who spent three years in silent meditation: "All the way to Heaven is Heaven," [62] Saint Catherine said, and that is the very breath of Zen, which does not elevate divinity above the common miracles of every day. GS counters by saying that all these people lived before the scientific revolution had changed the very nature of Western thought, which of course is true, but it is also true that in recent years, Western scientists have turned with new respect toward the intuitive sciences of the East. Einstein repeatedly expressed suspicion of the restrictions of linear thought, concluding that propositions arrived at by purely logical means were completely empty of reality even if one could properly explain what "reality" means; it was intuition, he declared, that had been crucial to his thinking. And there are close parallels in the theory of relativity to the Buddhist concept of the identity of time and space, which, like Hindu cosmology, derives from the ancient teachings of the Vedas. Somewhere, Einstein remarks that his theory could be readily explained to Indians of the Uto-Aztecan languages, which include the Pueblo and the Hopi. ("The Hopi does not say 'the light flashed' but merely 'flash,' without subject or time element; time cannot move because it is also space. The two are never separated; there are no words or expressions referring to time or space as separate from each other. This is close to the 'field' concept of modem physics. Furthermore, there is no temporal future; it is already with us, eventuating or ,manifesting.' What are in English differences of time are in Hopi differences of validity.)

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[107] One intuits truth in the Zen teachings, even those that are scarcely understood; and now intuition become knowing, not through merit but—it seemed—through grace.

buddhist • 250 • Matthiessen • bardo • bodhisattva • death • meditation • zen • zen & tibetan