The title of Mr. Braun’s (1961) article “The Politics of Zen” in itself contains the whole fallacy upon which his diatribe is based, for it is almost as if one were to speak of “the politics of physics” or of “the ethical implications of sight.” It is perhaps natural for us to think of Zen as a religion, and thus as a way of life having the same function in the cultures of the Far East as Christianity and Judaism in our own. Though the political records of the latter are none to clean, these religions have an avowedly ethical function: they believe alike that salvation comes by virtue of membership in a loving community—the Church, or the people of God. By deliberate intention, then, such religions are politically and morally normative.
But this is not the function of such disciplines as physics or even medicine. Perfectly sound physical or medical knowledge may be used for good or evil ends. Western physics made possible the unimaginable tortures of Hiroshima, and the healing of a lame man may enable him to kick his children. Would Mr. Braun suggest, then, that physics and medicine be abandoned? Or would he suggest that clear eyesight is a menace because it enables us to aim rifles?
Now Zen is somewhat like a science and somewhat like a highly sensitized faculty of perception, the combination of a certain kind of knowledge and skill. As knowledge, it is the direct (almost sensory) state of affairs which some scientists describe theoretically as the reciprocal or “transactional” behavior of an organism and its environment. It enables one to not only think but also to feel that organism/environment or man/universe is a unified field of behavior—as is, indeed, known to be the case in such sciences as ecology and biology. I have sometimes called Zen the immediate perception of relativity, or of the inseparable relatedness of all things and events. As skill, Zen comprises an art of freeing thought and action from what psychologists call “blocking” or from being nonplussed by certain types of dilemma. These dilemmas are approximately what some modern philosophers would term pseudo-problems or pseudo-alternatives. For example, “Where was your fist before you closed your hand?” is analogous to the Zen koan “Who were you before your mother and father conceived you?”
It is perfectly obvious that knowledge and skill of these kinds can be used in any form of action, and that they are as ethically neutral as electronics. Just as it is quite proper for us to question the political and ethical principles of men who employ the sciences, not the ethics of physics but of physicists, so it would have been quite proper for Mr. Braun to question the political intentions of various individuals who employ Zen. He would then have to direct his criticism to the philosophies or ideologies which do in fact provide the moral and political values of Far Eastern cultures—e.g., Confucianism and Shinto, and their derivatives.
Zen is concerned with the basic characteristics of life and the universe, but, unlike Christianity (which is similarly concerned), it does not seek in this realm for ethical directives. Christianity does so because of its belief in a personal God who is the guarantor of a supernatural and absolute moral order, but I doubt Mr. Braun would want to invoke this type of sanction for political ethics, for in its own way it is as dangerous as none at all. It is not subject to critical analysis, experiment, and change. As I see it and, as I am sure, many Zen Buddhists see it, the foundation for ethics is not to be found in science, metaphysics, or mysticism, but in mutual agreement between human beings as to how they want to behave. Ethically, we are not so much trains in search of rails as pilots in search of agreement as to schedules and air-lanes.
Mr. Braun, in common with many others, has of course been influenced by Arthur Koestler’s (1960) astonishingly poor piece of reporting, The Lotus and the Robot, especially the incident in the book where a Zen abbot refuses “to pass ethical judgment on Hitler’s murder of the Jews.” Readers of Koestler will remember that on this occasion the abbot characterized Hitler’s behavior as “foolish” rather than “sinful.” I do not know what sort of interpreter was present at this interview, so I can only guess that the abbot attributed Hitler’s action, as would any Buddhist, to mu-myo, which is roughly translatable as “ignorance” or “unconsciousness.” The abbot would have had no word for “sin” because he had no theology in which sin is the transgression of a supernatural moral order. Perhaps Koestler was offended because the abbot expressed no human horror. But I would suggest that a surgeon who gives way to human horror before a cancer operation may cut with an unsteady hand. The legitimate moral charge is that the Japanese did not act as surgeons in identifying Nazism and their own militarism as diseases, and this was the defect not of their Zen-vision, but of their value-judgments and the ethical systems underlying them. If all this made Koestler lose his interest in Oriental art, did it, I wonder, destroy his interest in Goethe and Schiller, Rilke and Bach?
In short, Mr. Braun has directed a very proper criticism of Japanese political ethics to the wrong address. His mistake, which I do not believe he would have made if he had read my own work carefully, was to identify Zen as a religious phenomenon from which one would expect judgments of value. This is simply not its sphere, just as it is not the sphere of medicine or logic as such. These deplorable cruelties and injustices are the faults neither of Zen in the East nor of nuclear physics in the West, but of our human cultures as wholes. It is, of course, quite understandable that Zen should be confused with a religion, that is, something of the same order as Christianity or Judaism. After all, it is a form of Buddhism, which is normally treated as a religion by many of its students and interpreters, inappropriately in my own view. (Shared by such other scholars as A. K. Coomaraswamy and Rene Guenon.) But Buddhism is a phenomenon with many levels and departments, reaching out with many different lines of inquiry. Zen is but one of these, and it happens to be concerned with the nature of man and the universe at a level which lies beyond good and evil. I see no way of denying the existence or validity of this level without absolutizing the standards of good and evil in some such form as the person of God.
To conclude with three points of detail: (1) Dr. Fujisawa’s book, Zen and Shinto (1959), is about as representative of Zen as Edgar Guest of American poetry. (2) My own social philosophy has changed considerably since I wrote The Supreme Identity in 1949 [and published in 1950], and I have tried to express some part of it in the final chapter of Psychotherapy East and West, written in 1960 [and published in 1961]. (3) Mr. Braun (1961) says that I have written “reams of pure unmitigated nonsense on the healthy sexual attitudes. … in the rustic paradise of the Asiatic village” (p. 180). I do not remember having written a single line, let alone reams, on the sexual life of the Asian village. In so far as I have discussed Asian sexual practices at all, I have been concerned with the rarely used and even quite esoteric sexual disciplines of Hindu and Buddhist Tantra. I wonder if Mr. Braun is really concerned with ethics.1
1. [See Braun (1962) for a reply to Watts—Eds.]
Braun, H. (1961). The politics of Zen. New Politics: A Journal of Socialist Thought, 1(1), 177–189.
Braun, H. (1962). Mr. Braun replies. New Politics: A Journal of Socialist Thought, 1(2), 172–173.
Fujisawa, C. (1959). Zen and Shinto: The story of Japanese philosophy. New York, NY: Philosophical Library.
Koestler, A. (1960). The lotus and the robot. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Watts, A. W. (1950). The supreme identity. New York, NY: Pantheon.
Watts, A. W. (1961). Psychotherapy East and West. New York, NY: Pantheon.
From New Politics: A Journal of Socialist Thought, 1962, 1(2), 170–172. Reprinted with permission of New Politics.