Dewey puts the abstract approach of the logical with the close touch of the aesthetic. While the actual can be enhanced by way of the abstruse, the first-hand fact comes first and last for him, as for Zen. In both, there is a fruitful tension between experience and interpretation, between figuring things out and feeling what they come to. The logical and the aesthetic come together in the daily round of human life, as vij~naana (conceptual thought) and praj~naa (supra-rational insight) do. Zen keeps Buddhist terms and turns of thought while smiling at them; Dewey makes light of formal learning, while using it. In both, any attempt to rise above nature is for a better look at what is there. In both, intense enjoyment of the immediate is the aim, with realization that it often has to be worked for and waited for, especially if it is to be made widely available and renewable. Zen is generally democratic in this fundamental way, as Dewey is. Both hold that men are significantly equal, and should be freed from whatever keeps any of them from the pursuit or happiness. If this goal is always a dynamic one, it is more so for Dewey, with the drive of science behind him and the factory at hand, instead of the monastery. But Dewey's motivation is not more social, except in his knowing more about the social makeup of the self. Going to a monastery has assumed that men cannot go far alone, that it helps them to grow to reside there a while, working with brothers at one or another common task, sharing their separation in silence, having the same master to ask what they all are after.

　　 Both Dewey and Zen have the bodhisattva ideal of helping others instead of seeking enlightenment only for oneself. Both are suspicious of specialization, erudition, any endeavor which seems to disdain the main stream of life. For both, the good which does not need to be justified is the ordinary good of living. But they recognize that it needs to be made more sharable, as well as more private, and that this leaves plenty of room for improvement, as much as if the end of life were beyond life.

　　 Santayana has said that man has a prejudice against himself, a tendency

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15. D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Second Series (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1952), p. 135

p. 315

to discount what he is and what he can do, either by himself or with the help of his fellows. Man has looked beyond experience, with its source and setting in the natural world, in search of something more. Even James felt impelled to look beyond. But he worked his way, in the direction Dewey Took more consistently, toward what is virtually the old Chinese Way or Tao. It is the road of holding that man is basically good, in a universe good for a good life, if man will take the trouble to understand himself and his situation. The difference for Dewey is that he is farther along on the same road, where it is paved with progress, where travel has the advantages of science but also the problems and fears it brings. With more knowledge, power, and freedom, it is more necessary to have wisdom.

　　 What was wise once is not enough. The meditation hall of a Zen monastery would not give adequate education now. Yet, its final lesson is more valuable than ever: that study and meditation are a waste of time, cultivation of simplicity and restraint not much better, unless the "secret virtue" is reached. The secret is: "Life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow."[16] This is the reliance on experience which came to James, when he saw that what any part of it leans on is the rest.

　　 The Zen insight was spread by painting and other forms of art. Though each man would have to find Zen for himself, the expression of it was best left to art. No philosophical statement can come as close; science falls short. Science hypothesizes, describes, calculates, generalizes. Yet, all this can be taken up into vivid living and coalesce with art. For Dewey, art is the fusion of life and learning, doing and undergoing. Art expresses what life is, and makes more of it, bringing life to a pitch and focus that clarify and complete it.

　　 The key to Dewey's wisdom, as to that of Zen, is that the high things are here, though to hold them takes practice. Dewey said: "... we should regard practice as the only means (other than accident) by which whatever is judged honorable, admirable, approvable can be kept in concrete existence."[17] This is the gist of both Dewey and Zen, different as they are. Practice, for Dewey, is vastly extended by science and complicated by the problems of democracy in a technological age. Zen is a way of facing life in the agricultural past of China and Japan. Both bring the ideal down, not to demean it but to keep it and live with it. Both feel that this makes more of it than to leave it in the air.

　　 Zen rejects the image of an "exalted figure ... surrounded and adored