Linji (?866), the founder of the Linji (Rinzai) School of Zen, preached to his disciples as follows: "On your lump of red flesh is a true man without rank who is always going in and out of the face of every one of you. Those who have not yet proved him, look, look!"² Here Linji impatiently encourages students to look to their true selves. According to Linji, one's "true self " exists neither inside nor outside of a physical body, but goes in and out through the sense organs at each moment of daily life. Thus, such a true self exists neither in the physical body, nor somewhere out of the body. But where does it exist? It is this true self, understood as neither existing inside or outside of the body, which Zazen meditation seeks to explore.

There are many well-known episodes of how Zen monks realized the "original self " that transcends the physical limits in each monk's daily life. Examples such as listening to the sound of a temple bell, smelling the fragrance of an apricot tree, looking at one's reflection on the water, having one's leg broken by the slamming of a door by a master, and so on reveal the various ways in which Zen Buddhism explains the discovery of one's true self.

All these happenings occur not in "still meditation" but in the motion of daily life. The true self is almost always discovered in the course of regular, everyday experience. This is the reason why Keiji Nishitani (1900-90), a Kyoto School philosopher of Zen Buddhism, defined religion as the "Real self-awareness of Reality by itself." And thus a Zen master teaches that there is no reality other than this true self, which is often realized when the doubtful self created through practice meets with nature through daily experience.

The Zen master Dōgen, founder of Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhism, wrote in a similar vein in the poem "Original Self " (Sanshōdōei in Japanese):

In Spring, Self is follower,
In Summer moon,
In Autumn, little cuckoo
In Winter, in coldness of Snow!

It is crucial to note that, in Zen Buddhism, one's true self is witnessed by and through surrounding nature; or, in other words, nature is the content of no-self, or true self.

it is well known that descartes cut the medieval teleological worldview into two parts, namely, the world of "res cogitans," which has its essence in thought or consciousness, and that of "res extensa," which has its essence in physical extension.³ With this division, Descartes's dualistic worldview was established, separated into matter and the "ego subjectivity" or substance of man, and humans began to stand in opposition to the nature that surrounds humankind. And, in so doing, humans became a solitary island floating in the dead ocean of "things."

As a result, science began to be able to treat and manipulate nature as it liked, so that science has advanced in amazing speed up to the present. The object of science is thoroughly a "world of the dead," which is moved by a series of laws of nature, from which science itself cannot be free. This attitude has continued in varying degrees to the present day.

In medieval times and before, the green planet Earth used to be like a unique greenhouse, protected from the dead nature of the universe. But since the beginning of the modern era brought in by Descartes, humans have begun to break apart the precious glass of our greenhouse through science and technology. Our planet has now come to stand for a dead aspect of nature.

In this way, this earth of living beings is now tending toward the world of death. In the near future, living beings may no longer be able to prosper here anymore, and only mechanical beings and the most resilient of organisms may be capable of surviving our fury of technological creation.

Today, in the midst of science's increasing knowledge, we may come to see that, while the debt to science is increasing, human unhappiness is also, unfortunately, increasing. With such a serious global situation at hand, scientists themselves, along with philosophers and many others, have begun to think about the limits of science.

Needless to say, even a scientist is a human being. No matter how committed she is, as an objective scientist, to a picture of nature, a scientist is still a person who lives in the emotional and physical world of her own daily life. Even inside the laboratory, a scientist keeps her religiosity, even if she remains a committed atheist. Even a medical doctor can be a patient, and if his doctor told him frankly that his disease was cancer, he might be shaken by the doctor's pronouncement, even though he had asked his doctor to tell him the truth.

And so it is true that nature is a mysterious mass even for the scientist, thereby opening up an infinite possibility by and for scientists. It is this infinite-possibility space that must force us all to begin to think of the limits of science.

It is true that our current global crisis is not merely the fault of science. It results also from a shallow understanding of human existence, for which, I posit, religion is responsible.