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16. D. T. Suzuki, Introduction to Zen Buddhism (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1949),

17. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Minion Balch & Co., 1929), p. 32.

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by the Bodhisattvas from the ten quarters of the world" and prefers to think of the Buddha as an old donkey-woman.[18] This anticipates Dewey's saying that philosophy has no authority except in resting on the goods diffused in human experience, and appraising them. Dualism is repudiated by Dewey and Zen. Both refuse to split experience into here and higher, into here and hereafter. Dewey weighs value in the scales of conditions and consequences. He would have men undertake ever more ambitious projects, guided by the cost and outcome of what they do. Zen is more quiet and collected, but condemns quietism. The monk must be up and doing most of the time. But historically he has been occupied with such chores as sweeping the floor, tilling the ground, gathering fuel, or trudging to a village with a begging bowl. What he had to do was done by hand or foot, when he was not puzzling over an old book, getting ready to ask a master about it, or just eating when hungry, sleeping when tired.

　　 Both Zen and Dewey are naturalistic, finding within experience all they could want. The obvious difference is that experience has been traditional and essentially unchanging for Zen. There are still the same things to be done, in the same way, as formerly. There are the same problems to be pondered. There is the same insight to arrive at, with the same surprise, though the ways of expressing it are endless. For Dewey, the development of the sign process in modern science has intervened. He sees man doing and thinking, not only the same old things, but also things that were never dreamed of. He has not only the Zen wisdom of appreciating what men are given, in the world and in the heritage they carry with them, but also the un-Zen sense of evolution and of man's getting increasing control of it. He has the idea of progress: that humanity can reconstruct the world and itself.

IV.　　 WITHOUT PURPOSE ON PURPOSE
　　 Planning ahead, which increases with science, apparently abandons the purposelessness of Zen. There is no doubt about a departure here from what Zen has meant. The question is whether the serenity of Zen can be recovered in a world on the move, where Zen is needed more than ever. The answer may be found in the fact that Dewey, no less than Zen, denies any purpose beyond that of being absorbed in the business of living. Does Zen in its most extreme expressions give up purpose in that sense? Zen does seem to say that purpose in any sense must be dropped. But is not the

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18. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Third Series, p. 102.

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reason for saying it that losing the urgency of purpose is instrumental to the cairn attitude which makes life worth while? Zen is not above the wisdom of serpents, as it is above the gentleness of doves. For all its forthrightness, Zen can be devious and disingenuous, in word play as in sword play. The feint of withdrawing purpose enables Zen to thrust it in.

　　 Why have Zen if there is no point to it, no use in it? And why should Zen develop its discipline, techniques, and monastic system? It would all be meaningless if it had no direction or intention. If the idea is to get rid of purpose, that is still a purpose.

　　 The fact is that purposiveness and purposelessness are not incompatible in the perfection of experience which Dewey calls aesthetic, as Kant knew when he spoke of it as Zweckmassigkeit ohne Zweck. The more one studies The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind,[19] in which Suzuki expounds the doctrine of no-purpose, the more one is aware of an end in view, and of a search for the means to reach it. The end is the good life, as free-flowing activity -- free of inhibition, worry, tension. Aristotle, to the same end, urged the formation of good habits -- so did James -- in order that energy might be directed more or less unconsciously, so that, for the most part, a man would do the right thing without thinking. If this is what Zen means by living without thought or purpose, it is also what Dewey means.

　　 But Dewey explains what Zen tacitly admits: that it takes some thought to get back (or ahead) to living without thinking. He realizes that, though there is no goal but the going, the going can be improved. He has no purpose beyond that. If this is called being without purpose, it does not preclude but requires purposes in the plural. As Zen established monasteries, using manuals and manual duties to induce, if not to teach, wisdom, so Dewey was concerned with education. Both Zen and he believed in learning by doing, believed that to live is to learn and that to learn is to live better. Zen served a rather stationary culture. Dewey tried to help a dynamic civilization arrive at a sense of rightness and wholeness. His was the harder task, which cannot be finished, since every advance of science and technology, while making life easier in some respect, makes it harder to recover the joy of living without hurry or distraction. And there is the dread of losing control of fast-moving, wreck-avoiding if not disastrous, events.