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　　 WHAT MAKES IT most difficult for a Western thinker to write on Zen is that he tries to understand it from the linguistic, logical, or philosophical point of view. This is inevitable. One cannot transcend his cultural heritage as soon as something new comes to his head.

　　 To understand Zen one must abandon all he has acquired by way of conceptual knowledge and stand before it stripped of every bit of the intellection he has patiently accumulated around him. When, for instance, Dewey talks of "the here and the now," as quoted by Dr. Ames, they both neglect to face the problem personally and sec what it experientially tells them. As I see it, they keep "the here and the now" away from their lives and look at it from a conceptual distance. They somehow seem to be afraid of jumping right to the point where space and time have not yet differentiated themselves.

　　 Those who have habitually been taught and disciplined to keep "the here and the now" at a distance will naturally be timid about touching the object. Zen proposes, on the contrary, to grasp it with one's own naked hands, with no gloves on. This is the most realistic way of understanding what "the here and the now" is. This is, in fact, the only way to know what it is, for it is in this way that one knows what one is talking about. As long as one shies away from touching it, all that can be done is talk about it. This is the reason philosophical discussion makes one feel as if one is scratching an itch through the shoe, as the Chinese saying has it.

　　 The Zen master does not tolerate this roundabout way of handling reality. Hence his swinging of the stick. The stick, however, is not meant to give one a shock. It is meant to make one feel it as something most intimate, most concrete, and most personal. Touch is the most primary sensation. Hearing comes next, while seeing is the farthest away from actuality itself. Intellection is seeing and not touching.

　　 The stick came to be utilized sometimes for a pedagogical purpose, but its primary use was direct and instinctual, as it were. No idea of instrumentality was there in its first application. A monk may ask, "What is

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my self?" and the master's stick is immediately on him. Could anything be more direct and personal? If the monk had been wrestling at all with the problem of self, the blow would have at once awakened him to the solution.

　　 Suiryo asked Baso (d. 788), "What is Bodhidharma's idea of coming to this country from the West [that is, India]?" The question is the same as asking, "What is the ultimate teaching of Buddhism?" or, "What is the self?"

　　 Instead of giving any verbal answer which might be expected of a philosopher or of any ordinary professor of logic or dialectic, Baso gave his questioner a kick on the chest which made the monk fall to the ground. When he arose, however, he gave a hearty laugh, exclaiming, "How wonderful! How strange! Infinities of mysteries hidden in hundreds of thousands of samaadhis are revealed at the tip of one hair which I now perceive down to their very depths." He then bowed to the master and departed. Later he said to his Brotherhood, "Ever since the kick given by my master, I cannot help going on laughing."

　　 If Baso had given Suiryo a lengthy talk on the truth of Buddhism, as a college professor might have done, I wonder if Suiryo could have recovered  from a kick with such a magnificent expression.

　　 "The here and the now" of Baso's kick allowed Suiryo no time for a  conceptual interpretation. James, Dewey, Peirce, Ames, and many other philosophers, big or small, could never have experienced the truth of Zen dangling from the tip of their pen, inasmuch as their profession does not go any further or deeper or more existentialistic than it actually does.

　　 This, however, we must remember, does not mean that Zen looks upon a philosophical interpretation of its experience as something below its dignity. Zen welcomes logic or philosophy or linguistics. Zen is their good friend, always ready to make their acquaintance. What Zen refuses is to have such professional studies as the object of its training. Zen cannot make an alliance with those who may think that Zen is exhausted by intellectualization.

　　 "Pure experience" is all right as far as it goes, but Zen asks us to experience it by ourselves. Zen is not a concept, and, therefore, it has no ambition to become the object of philosophical study and stop there. Zen wishes the philosopher to go back to his inner self (I am afraid I am philosophizing - the self which makes him philosophize. That is to say, the philosopher is to return to himself even before he was a philosopher and face his "here  and now" as if he were still a resident like his ancestor Adam in the garden of Eden who saw God daily in his workshop as creator.