“Thirty years ago, before I studied Chan, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers.” Then mountains were not mountains, and at last they were “just mountains” again. Zen is often presented in the West as anti-intellectual mystery. This lesson reads what the Chan masters actually said, and sets it beside Nishida Kitarō’s “pure experience,” Heidegger’s letting-be, and Wittgenstein’s return to the ordinary, and asks why the end of the path looks so much like where it began. 「老僧三十年前未參禪時，見山是山，見水是水。」後來見山不是山；最後，又「依前見山祇是山」。禪在西方常被介紹成反智的神祕。這一課讀禪師們實際上說了什麼，並把它跟西田幾多郎的「純粹經驗」、海德格的「任其所是」、維根斯坦的「回到日常」並列，並且問：為什麼道路的終點，看起來跟起點那麼像？
D24 Dharma and the West · 佛法與西方哲學Ethics and Practice · 倫理與修行Advanced · 高級about 30 min
禪・見性
jhāna Pāli dhyāna SanskritChan, Zen; seeing one’s nature
The verdict · 判定
Closest: Nishida Kitarō, who trained in Zen for years and built a philosophy on “pure experience,” a term he took from William James for experience before it splits into subject and object. He is the real bridge, since he wrote Western philosophy out of Zen practice. The likeness ends at how the experience is reached and what it is for. For Nishida pure experience was the starting point of a philosophical system. For the Chan masters it was something realized through long practice and then lived, in “wearing clothes and eating rice,” without making a system of it. Heidegger and Wittgenstein are close on the way out of philosophy’s confusions, and the Chan path ends somewhere they did not try to go: in a teacher’s compassion for a student.
中文翻譯Every paragraph has a Chinese translation. Tap 中譯▾ under a paragraph to open that one, or use Show Chinese · 顯示中譯 at the top to open them all.每一段都有中譯：點段落下方的「中譯」只開那一段，或按上方的「顯示中譯」一次全部打開。
1 · What the Dharma says · 佛法怎麼說
No thought, the ordinary mind, and the mountain 無念、平常心，與山
Chan, which became Zen in Japan, takes its name from dhyāna, meditation, and it describes itself as a direct pointing at the mind. Its most famous text is the Platform Sūtra of the sixth patriarch Huineng. When a monk wrote that the mind is like a mirror that must be wiped clean, Huineng, an illiterate kitchen worker, had someone write his reply: “Bodhi originally has no tree; the bright mirror is no stand. Originally there is not a single thing. Where could dust alight?” The sūtra’s teaching is precise. “From the beginning this Dharma gate has taken no-thought as its doctrine, no-form as its substance, and non-abiding as its root.” And no-thought is carefully defined: “No-thought means, in thought, not being caught by thought.” Huineng warns against the obvious misreading: “If you simply think of nothing, and get rid of all thought, then when thought is cut off you die and are reborn elsewhere. That is a great mistake.”
The same sūtra refuses to separate meditation from wisdom. “Concentration and wisdom are one body, not two. Concentration is the body of wisdom, and wisdom is the function of concentration,” like a lamp and its light. Later masters brought this down to daily life. Linji, in the ninth century, said that the Buddhadharma has no place for special effort: it is “just being ordinary, with nothing to do: relieving oneself, wearing clothes, eating rice, lying down when tired.” And then: “Be master wherever you are, and wherever you stand is true.” Chan teachers also used the public case, the kōan, to break the habit of conceptual grasping. A monk asked Zhaozhou whether a dog has buddha-nature, and Zhaozhou said, “Wu,” no. The Gateless Barrier makes that single word its first case: “To study Chan you must pass the barrier of the patriarchs. Wondrous awakening requires that the road of the mind be cut off.”
The best summary of the path is a short sermon by the Song dynasty master Qingyuan Weixin, recorded in the Compendium of the Five Lamps. “Thirty years ago, before I studied Chan, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers. Later, when I met a teacher and gained an entry, I saw that mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers. Now that I have found a place of rest, I see mountains as just mountains and rivers as just rivers. Everyone, are these three views the same or different?” The second stage is emptiness, the discovery that nothing has the fixed nature it seemed to have. The third is the return, where the ordinary world is seen without grasping. Chan did not reject the rest of Buddhism. The Platform Sūtra is full of the precepts, the bodhisattva vows, and the perfection of wisdom, and the Chinese masters joined Chan with Pure Land practice too. Yunqi Zhuhong, asked whether Chan is faster than reciting the Buddha’s name, compared them to two people traveling to the same treasure, one on horseback and one by boat: “When traveling far, arriving is what matters.”
Why Chan points instead of explaining 為什麼禪是指出，而不是解釋
3 · The nearest Western views · 西方最接近的說法
Pure experience, letting-be, the ordinary 純粹經驗、任其所是、日常
The real bridge · 真正的橋
Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎1911
Nishida Kitarō, the founder of the Kyoto School, practiced Zen intensively for about ten years while teaching philosophy, and his first book, An Inquiry into the Good, opens with pure experience. He took the term from William James, who had written that “the instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.” For James it is “plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.” Nishida made this the foundation of everything: before there is a knower and a known, there is experience itself, and the self and the world are later abstractions from it. A musician absorbed in playing, he suggested, does not experience a subject and an object. Readers who know Huineng’s no-thought hear the echo at once. Nishida went on to develop a philosophy of “place” and of “absolute nothingness,” using Western terms to say what Zen had shown him. He is the closest parallel because he is not a parallel at all. He is the point where the two traditions met in one person.
Heidegger argued that modern Western thought has become calculative. It treats everything, nature and people included, as a resource to be measured, ordered, and used. Against this he described another kind of thinking, which he called meditative, and an attitude he named Gelassenheit, often translated as releasement or letting-be: a readiness to let things show themselves as they are, without seizing them for our purposes. His late writings return again and again to the plain things of a rural life, a jug, a bridge, a path through the fields. Japanese philosophers of the Kyoto School studied with him, and there are well-known reports that he was struck by D. T. Suzuki’s books on Zen. The parallel with Chan is real. Both distrust the grasping mind, both look for truth in ordinary things seen without grasping, and both are suspicious of systems. The difference is that Heidegger’s letting-be has no practice attached to it. He offers no method of sitting, no teacher, no precepts. Chan without practice would be, for the masters, only talk about the moon.
In his later work, the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein came to see philosophical problems as confusions produced when language goes on holiday, when words are taken out of the ordinary activities that give them sense. The cure is not a new theory but a patient return to how words are actually used, until the problem disappears. He said that philosophy should leave everything as it is, and that its aim is to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. This is very close to the third stage of Qingyuan’s sermon. After the confusion, mountains are just mountains again, the same as before and yet seen differently. Wittgenstein also taught in a way that resembles a Chan teacher’s: by examples, questions, and reminders, without doctrines to memorize. The difference is the scope of the confusion. For Wittgenstein the bottle is made of philosophical puzzles. For the Chan masters it is made of grasping and the sense of a separate self, and the way out is not only clearer thinking but a change in how one lives. The lesson on the four corners and the lesson on emptiness looked at the earlier and later Wittgenstein from other angles.
Who is closest, and where the likeness ends 誰最接近，相似到哪裡為止
The closest is Nishida, because he practiced Zen and wrote philosophy from it, and his pure experience, borrowed from James, names what Huineng’s no-thought describes: experience before it splits into a self and its objects. Heidegger is closest on the attitude, letting things be instead of seizing them, and on the turn to plain things. Wittgenstein is closest on the shape of the path, a confusion that ends by returning to the ordinary, where mountains are just mountains.
The likeness ends at practice and compassion. Each Western thinker reached his insight by thinking and wrote it down as philosophy. The Chan masters said that seeing one’s nature comes through practice, sitting, kōans, precepts, and a teacher, and that it shows in how one wears clothes and eats rice. Nishida himself kept these two apart: his books are philosophy, and his Zen was done in the meditation hall. And Chan belongs to the Mahāyāna. In the Platform Sūtra Huineng has his listeners take the four great vows, the first of which is to save all beings. The return to the ordinary in the third stage is also a return to other people. Huineng’s mountains are just mountains, and they are also the place where a bodhisattva works.
Practice, and the bodhisattva in the marketplace 修行，以及市集裡的菩薩
The first further step is that Chan insists on practice, and the West has often missed this. Since the 1950s Zen has been presented in Western books as spontaneity, paradox, and freedom from rules, and the image of the eccentric master who burns buddha statues has traveled better than the image of the monk who sits for decades. Linji’s line that the Buddhadharma is just eating and sleeping was spoken to monks who had already spent years in strict training. Huineng was explicit that suppressing thought is a mistake, and he was just as explicit that the teaching is for practice: “Self-awakening and practice do not lie in argument.” For a Western teacher, the most useful thing to say about Zen may be that it is a discipline. The spontaneity comes at the end of the training. It does not replace the training.
The second step is that the return to the ordinary is a return to other people. The old Chinese series of ox-herding pictures, which shows the search for the self as a search for a lost ox, does not end with an empty circle. Its last picture shows the sage entering the marketplace with open hands, among ordinary people. Western philosophers who approached Zen mostly stopped at the empty circle, the insight, or the letting-be. The Chan masters went on. The Platform Sūtra includes the vow to save all beings, the masters spent their lives teaching, and Yunqi Zhuhong taught monks and laypeople alike that Chan and the Pure Land arrive at the same treasure. This is where the whole shelf ends. Each lesson has compared a Buddhist idea with its Western neighbors, and each time the likeness ended at the purpose. For Buddhism the purpose of every idea is the end of suffering, one’s own and that of others.
Most Westerners already have an idea of Zen, often from design, tea, or self-help books, and it usually involves an empty mind and a clever paradox. Start by correcting the first gently with Huineng’s own words: thinking of nothing is “a great mistake,” and no-thought means not being caught by thought. Then tell Qingyuan’s sermon about the mountains, which almost everyone finds memorable, and ask which of the three stages the audience is in. For philosophy students, introduce Nishida as the person who brought Zen into Western philosophy, with William James’ pure experience as the link. Make the two points the West tends to miss: Zen is a discipline with teachers and precepts, and it ends in compassion. Close with the ox-herding picture of the sage entering the marketplace.
Huineng said that trying to think of nothing is “a great mistake.” No-thought means not being caught by thought.
惠能說，想要什麼都不想是「大錯」。無念的意思是不被念頭抓住。
Before practice, mountains are mountains. Then they are not mountains. At the end, they are just mountains again.
修行之前，見山是山。然後見山不是山。到最後，又見山祇是山。
Linji said the Buddhadharma is just wearing clothes, eating rice, and lying down when tired.
臨濟說，佛法只是著衣、喫飯、困來即臥。
Nishida Kitarō trained in Zen and borrowed William James’ term “pure experience” to describe it.
西田幾多郎修過禪，並借用威廉・詹姆斯的「純粹經驗」一詞來描述它。
Zen is a discipline. The spontaneity comes at the end of the training. It does not replace it.
禪是一種紀律。自發是在訓練的終點才出現的；它不取代訓練。
The last ox-herding picture shows the sage returning to the marketplace to help others.
十牛圖的最後一幅，是聖者回到市集去幫助別人。
Phrases to avoid 要避開的說法
“Zen means emptying your mind of all thoughts.” 「禪就是把心裡所有的念頭清空。」
Huineng called that a great mistake.
惠能稱之為大錯。
“Zen rejects rules and scriptures.” 「禪拒絕規則與經典。」
The masters kept precepts, read sūtras, and wrote a great deal.
禪師們持戒、讀經，也寫了很多東西。
“A kōan is a riddle with a clever answer.” 「公案是一個有巧妙答案的謎語。」
It is a training device for cutting through conceptual grasping.
它是一種用來切穿概念執取的訓練工具。
“Zen is a philosophy you can learn from books.” 「禪是一套可以從書本學會的哲學。」
Even Nishida kept his books and his meditation hall apart.
即使是西田，也把他的書與他的禪堂分開。
Three languages · 三語對照
The vocabulary, in Chinese, Pāli, Sanskrit, and English 術語：中文、巴利文、梵文、英文
中文
Pāli
Sanskrit
English
禪
jhāna
dhyāna
meditation; Chan, Zen
見性
—
—
seeing one’s nature
無念・無相・無住
—
—
no-thought, no-form, non-abiding
定慧一體
samādhi, paññā
samādhi, prajñā
concentration and wisdom as one
公案
—
—
kōan; public case
平常心
—
—
the ordinary mind
四弘誓願
—
—
the four great vows
十牛圖
—
—
the ox-herding pictures
純粹經驗
—
—
pure experience (James, Nishida)
絕對無
—
—
absolute nothingness (Nishida)
禪淨雙修
—
—
joint practice of Chan and Pure Land
Reading check · 理解測驗
Did it land? 讀懂了嗎
1. How does the Platform Sūtra define no-thought?
2. What are the three stages in Qingyuan Weixin’s sermon?
3. Where did Nishida Kitarō take the term “pure experience” from?
4. According to the lesson, what does Heidegger’s letting-be lack, compared with Chan?
5. What does the last ox-herding picture show?
Write · 你怎麼講？
Which of Qingyuan’s three stages describes your relationship to something you have studied deeply? Describe it. About 150 words.
青原的三個階段中，哪一個描述了你與某樣你深入學習過的東西的關係？描述它。約 150 個字。
Huineng says thinking of nothing is a great mistake. Explain no-thought to a friend who thinks meditation means emptying the mind.
惠能說什麼都不想是大錯。向一位認為禪修就是清空心靈的朋友，解釋「無念」。
This shelf compared Buddhism with Western philosophy in twenty-five lessons. In 200 words, say what you think is the most important difference, and why.
