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4. Ibid., p. 30.

5. Ibid., p. 46.

6. Ibid., p. 25.

7. Ibid., p. 45.

8. Ibid., p. 18.

9. Ibid., p. 36.

10. D. T. Suzuki "The Philosophy of Zen," Philosophy East and West, I, No 2 (July, 1951), 3.

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agree with Harold E. McCarthy's interpretation of Goethe's Faust in the spirit of Zen, and, in a qualified way, with my comparison of Zen with pragmatism and existentialism. "There is something in the theory of Zen that may pass into a form of pragmatism or existentialism, " he grants. His qualification is that the theory of Zen is far from being the whole of Zen, for "Zen is not to be confined within conceptualization," since "Zen is what makes conceptualization possible." [11]

II
　　 Pragmatism and existentialism are like Zen in subordinating theory to something experienced rather than thought or argued. Yet, all three are in need of theory. Suzuki observes that "Zen would not be Zen if it were deprived of all means of communication.... Zen must have its philosophy." [12] But he will not let us forget how much more Zen is than its philosophy. Is this not what the existentialist has in mind in saying that existence comes before essence and the pragmatist in saying that the problems of philosophers must be related to the problems of men? The existentialist suffers from the sense of man's alienation from his fellows and the world. If an existentialist is able to overcome anguish and dread, by pitting faith in God against doubt, or by trusting co-operation with other men, he loses his standpoint with his pessimism. And the pragmatist may seem to lose too, much of his individual identity when he goes beyond self-realization to the social pole of his philosophy. Yet William James was not uninfluenced by his father, who told of deliverance from what he had considered "the inappreciable boon of selfhood" when it appeared "the one thing damnable on earth." [13]

　　 What had seemed an independent and separate self, which might be surrendered to solidarity, gave way in later analysis to recognition of a social self, as in the psychology of George H. Mead. [14] And Dewey has shown that in James's Principles of Psychology [15] the old subjective subject had begun to vanish into an organism "having no existence save in interaction with environing conditions." Then "subject and object do not stand for separate orders or kinds of existence but at most for certain distinctions made for a definite purpose within. experience.'' [16] The teaching of experience as basic --

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11. Ibid., p. 3.

12. Ibid., p. 4.

13. William James ed., The Literary Remains of Henry James (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1885), p. 71; quoted by Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1935), Vol. I, p. 20.

14. George H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).

15. The Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890).

16. John Dewey, "The Vanishing Subject in the Psychology of James," The Journal of Philosophy, XXXVII, No. 22 (October 24, 1940), 589; reprinted in John Dewey, The Problems of Men (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 396.

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pure experience, as James would have it -- is close in Suzuki's insistence that Zen is "life itself," and that any dualism of subject and object is the result of artificial analysis. In fact he has said: "the masters of Zen Buddhism... are not philosophers but pragmatists" became "they appeal to an experience and not to verbalism...." [17] But he expressed himself more happily when he said, "Zen must have its philosophy"; and, if it is wiser to rely on life than on words, are pragmatists not philosophers?

　　 In trying to say what "life itself" is, Suzuki uses the term `suunyataa or emptiness; whereas our Biblical tradition makes it natural for us Westerners to speak of the fullness of life. Suzuki is quick to add that 'suunyataa is not a negative term but a positive concept, and is not arrived at by abstraction or postulation, for it is "what makes the existence of anything possible." [18] Since there is no division of subject and object in the experience of `suunyataa, the plunge into it requires the doffing of all reasoning. The intellectual procedure which works "in dealing with this world of relativities" will not work "when we want to get down into the very bedrock of reality, which is `suunyataa." There, we are told, "we must appeal to another method; and there is no other method than that of casting away this intellectual weapon and in all nakedness plunging into `suunyataa itself." [19]

　　 With the revival of irrationalism in our time, this advice to stop thinking and plunge should give pause. One might suppose it easy to plunge; that plunging would not require an assiduous "work of intellection" or reasoning in reverse. But if the plunge takes patient preparation, and it has to do with the art and culture of China and Japan, then what is involved may not be just a rejection of intelligence and a relapse into animality. If the emptiness of 'suunyataa means being emptied or purified of what is worthless, we can understand that it is not negative. But if it empties out whatever is relative, specific, and differentiated, it calls for the negation of pragmatism's radical empiricism. Much Western scientific, artistic, and religious education is, then, largely at odds with Zen. Against it is out emphasis upon ideas, concepts, and distinctions, upon schools, periods, and history. There has been, to be sure, a mystical aspect of art and religion in the West. There have been mystics in out midst. But we have often wondered whether to admire them for what they might accomplish in spite of what they were, whether what they did depended upon what they were, or whether their being was more