June 24, 2006
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Zen and the Art
“Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.”
– “Ancient Zen saying,” according to “Today in History,” June 24, by the Associated Press
“A man may be free to travel where he likes, but there is no place on
earth where he can escape from his own Karma, and whether he lives on a
mountain or in a city he may still be the victim of an uncontrolled
mind. For man’s Karma travels with him, like his shadow.
Indeed, it is his shadow, for it has been said, ‘Man stands in his own
shadow and wonders why it is dark.’”– Alan W. Watts, The Spirit of Zen, third edition, Grove Press, 1958, page 97
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974:
“But what’s happening is that each year our old flat earth of
conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the
experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of
topsy-turviness. As a result we’re getting more and more people in
irrational areas of thought… occultism, mysticism, drug changes and
the like… because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to
handle what they know are real experiences.”“I’m not sure what you mean by classical reason.”
“Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at
the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of
understanding. You’ve never had to understand it really. It’s always
been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative
art is one of the root experiences I’m talking about. Some people still
condemn it because it doesn’t make ‘sense.’ But what’s really wrong is
not the art but the ‘sense,’ the classical reason, which can’t grasp
it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover
art’s more recent occurrences, but the answers aren’t in the branches,
they’re at the roots.”
Related material:
D-Day Morning,
Figures of Speech,
Ursprache Revisited.See also
the previous entry.
