Carl Gustav Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
Every major Zen cultural form is designed to operate on the mind in some manipulative, non-Western fashion. If we look carefully, we find that not one of the Zen forms has a real counterpart in Western culture. Zen archery and swordsmanship seem almost a species of hypnotism. Zen gardens are a bag of tricks and specifically designed to deceive one's perception. Zen painting is a product of the nonrational counter mind; although it requires training at least as rigorous as any that a Western academy could supply, at the critical moment the training is forgotten and the work becomes wholly spontaneous. No drama uses clever devices of suggestion to push the mind into areas of understanding too profound for words, while the open-ended Haiku is a spark igniting an explosion of imagery and nonrational perception in the listener's mind. The traditional Japanese house is a psychological chamber from floor to ceiling. Zen ceramics by subtle deceptions destroy our impulses to categorize, forcing us to experience directly materials, process, and form. The tea ceremony is still another exercise in deliberately altering one's state of mind, this time under the guise of a simple social occasion. It seems almost as if the Zen arts were intended to be an object lesson to us on the limitations of the senses in defining reality. Just as the koan taunt the logical mind, the Zen arts, by toying with perception, remind us that there is a reality not subject to the five senses. In Eastern philosophy, although "seeing" involves the senses, it must ultimately transcend them.
Zen culture has been devised over the centuries to bring us in touch with a portion of ourselves we in the West scarcely know—our nonrational, nonverbal side. Whereas Ch'an masters of a thousand years ago were devising mind exercises to short-circuit and defeat the limiting characteristics of the rational side of the mind, the idea of the counter mind has only recently found experimental validation—and hence intellectual respectability—in the rationalist West. (As one example of many, recent experiments at Harvard University found that "questions demanding . . . verbal . . . processes result in the greatest left [brain] hemispherical activation . . . [while] emotional questions elicit the greatest right hemispheric activation."1) Apparently not only did the Ch'an masters intuitively realize the existence of the nonverbal half of the mind during the T'ang era (618- 907), but they, and later the Japanese, used it to create a spectrum of art and cultural forms which exploits, strengthens, and sharpens these same nonverbal faculties.
Zen cultural forms are the perfect physical proof of the strength of the counter mind. Even those using language (the No and Haiku) rely more on suggestion than on words. Indeed, the very language of Japan was recently described by a Japanese scholar in terms that make it sound almost like an intuitive,
counter-mind phenomenon: "English is a language intended strictly for communication. Japanese is primarily interested in feeling out the other person's mood, in order to work out one's own course of action based on one's impression."2 This difference in approach to language, in which it is seen as a virtual barrier to communicating what is really significant (one's subjective response), appears to be a side effect of Zen culture. As a Japanese critic recently observed,
A corollary to the Japanese attitude toward language might be called the "aesthetics of silence"-—making a virtue of reticence and a vulgarity of verbalization or open expression of one's inner thoughts. This attitude can be traced to the Zen Buddhist idea that man is capable of arriving at the highest level of contemplative being only when he makes no attempt at verbalizations and discounts oral expression as the height of superficiality.3
Finally, Zen cultural forms use the nonverbal, nonrational powers of the mind to produce in the perceiver a complete sense of identification with the object. If a Zen art work is truly successful, the perceiver has no sense of "I" and "it." If reflection or analysis is required, the work is of no more use than a joke whose punch line needs explanation. One's mind must immediately experience something beyond the work. Even as the eye cannot see itself without a mirror, so it is with the mind. The inducing of introspection turns out to be a deliberate function of Zen art—the forcing of the mind past the surface form of an art work and into a direct experience of a greater truth.
The Zen arts are, we realize at last, completely internalized. They depend as much on the perception of the viewer or participants as they do on any of their own inherent qualities. For this reason they can be sparing and restrained. (They also happen to be perfectly suited to a land that, over the centuries, has been as physically impoverished as Japan.) By using small- scale, suggestive arts that depend to a large extent on the special perception of the audience for their impact, Zen artists were able to provide immense satisfaction with only a minor investment of resources. It is rather like the relation of radio to television drama. Given an audience with a good imagination, a radio dramatist or a Zen artist can achieve the intended effect through suggestion. This is what Sir George Sansom had in mind when he remarked upon the
important part played by aesthetic feeling in the enrichment of Japanese life. Among Japanese of all classes, an instinctive awareness of beauty seems to compensate for a standard of well-being which to Western judgement seems poor and bleak. Their habit of finding pleasure in common things, their quick appreciation of form and color, their feelings for simple elegance, are gifts which may well be envied by us who depend so much for our happiness upon quantity of possessions and complexity of apparatus. Such happy conditions, in which frugality is not the enemy of satisfaction, are perhaps the most distinctive features in the cultural history of Japan.4
Zen culture, working with the already highly developed vocabulary and capacity for perception developed in the Heian era, unlocked powerful new techniques that have made Japanese culture a special case in the annals of world civilization. Perhaps the best case in point is the stone garden at Ryoan-ji, which is a triumph of pure suggestiveness. It is clearly a symbol—but a symbol of what? It is clearly an invitation to open one's perception—but open it to what? The work gives no hint. With Ryoan-ji Zen artists finally perfected the device of suggestiveness to the point where it could stand on its own. The garden seems almost to be a natural object, like a sunset or a piece of driftwood. The impact of a traditional Zen room is similar. It simply amplifies whatever powers of understanding the viewer already possesses. Of itself it is a void.