II.　　 THE UNQUESTIONABLE PRESENT
　　 Though man thrives on striving, Dewey thinks of all his effort as taking off from and taken up into appreciation of the present. When we are happy we are housed in the here and now. We leave it only to restore it or to enrich it with more variety, also with more reassuring continuity. Dewey likes Emerson's saying: "If man is sick, is unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is because there is so much of his nature which is unlawfully withholden from him." Dewey agrees that what is most needful is "the possession of the unquestionable Present." When it can be had in joy and peace, it not only passes man's understanding but takes the place of the high-flown ideas of the transcendentalists, and "removes him from their remoteness."[3] Then man can enjoy the moment no end. To live in the moment is to have sheer immediacy, without beginning or stopping, without thought of yesterday or tomorrow except as belonging to the eternal now.

　　 But Dewey was like a bodhisattva, a saint of Mahayana Buddhism, who would not enter nirvaa.na if he had to forget the need of other people to be helped toward it. So was James, in saying the millennium would not come as long as a single cockroach suffered an unrequited love. Yet, James and Dewey had the Zen secret that it is possible to be like a turtle on a log even on the go, as everyone can learn to relax on a train or plane, in a pause of business, or in the law's delays. The Zen men knew that the sure way of getting to the mountains was to have them in mind. If the Zen experience could be had while hewing wood or drawing water, so might it be had while doing whatever needed to be done. This is the gist of Dewey's aesthetics: that the enjoyment of art need not be apart from the usual interests and activities of life.

　　 His practical attitude is paralleled by the Buddhist suutra of the Ga.n.davyuuha. Suzuki explains it as belonging to the Mahaayaana reaction against

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 3. Ibid., p. 75.

p. 308

Buddhism which "lacks vitality and democratic usefulness when it is kept from coming in contact with the concrete affairs of life."[4] When Buddhism was brought to earth it was possible to enjoy the contrast between grand terminology and a plain meaning. Thus: "Samantabhadra's arms raised to save sentient beings become our own, which are now engaged in passing the salt to a friend at the table, and Maitreya's opening the Vairochana Tower for Sudhana is our ushering in a caller into the parlor for a friendly chat . . . we see both the Bodhisattvas and the Buddhas shining in the sweat of their foreheads, in the tears shed for the mother who lost a child, in the fury of passions burning against injustice in its multifarious forms -- in short, in their never-ending fight against all that goes under the name of evil."[5]

　　 Here, in the East, is James's fight for ends and Dewey's devotion to good causes, for their human value. In the Ga.n.davyuuha Suzuki sees the transition from Buddhism as a "mysticism which keeps its votaries on the giddy height of unapproachable abstractions making them refuse to descend among earthly entanglements" to a kind of Buddhism which "now overlaps this earthly world." Now: "all the Bodhisattvas, including the Buddhas -- are ourselves, and their doings are our doings."[6] Suzuki uses this suutra to bring out that Zen carries the same transition further and more deliberately. Then, to ask, "Who is Buddha?" is really to ask, "Who are you?" The name "Buddha" is used "to help" us appreciate what it is to be human. "The constant advice given by the Zen master to his monks is not to cling to the letter."[7] Suzuki sums it up: "We can say that the Chinese practical genius has brought the Buddha down again on earth so that he can work among us with his back bare and his forehead streaked with sweat and covered with mud. Compared with the exalted figure at Jetavana surrounded and adored by the Bodhisattvas from the ten quarters of the world, what a caricature this old donkey-leading woman-Buddha of Shou-shan, or that robust sinewy bare-footed runner of Chih-men! But in this we see the spirit of the Ga.n.davyuuha perfectly acclimatized in the Far Eastern soil."[8]

　　 Suzuki is not willing to accept Hu Shih's interpretation of Zen as "the revolt of Chinese psychology against abstruse Buddhist metaphysics." For Suzuki, Zen "is not a revolt but a deep appreciation" of Buddhism, expressed "in the Chinese way."[9] Whether we side with Suzuki or with Hu, the American question is where their controversy[10] leaves James and Dewey in comparison with Santayana. He might seem closer to Zen in cherishing im-

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4. D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Third Series (London: Rider and Co., 1953), p. 78.