Zeal for Zen

By Norimoto Iino

The Zen scholar and author of Hints in Haiku offers a revealing introduction to Zen thought and practice in this collection of essays.

In 1964, when he accepted a visiting professorship at Coe College teaching non-Western studies, Norimoto Iino wrote this uniquely insightful introduction to Zen for his students. As he says in the preface, “Zen is a subject notoriously elusive. It goes beyond the happiest form of linguistic expression.” And yet, Iino pursues his topic with illuminating clarity and probing insight.

In Zeal for Zen, Iino discusses Zen as an ever-evolving way of seeing and a powerful antidote to the egoistic pursuit of power. He covers a wide range of topics, from Soto Zen and Zen prayer to mathematics, modern physics, and the Zenlike works of English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philosophical Library Open Road
• Release date: Apr 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781504067089

Book preview

Preface

Panic of error is the death of progress. So realizing I have written this essay, based on the view that like a many-faceted diamond, truth is shining with an infinite number of dynamic dimensions. It would take divine omniscience to see all of them. No human attempt to exhaust the meaning of even one of them can be free from egregious errors. Truth-seeking is promising only when it is humble.

Zen is a subject notoriously evasive. It goes beyond the happiest form of linguistic expression. My dealings with western students have disclosed to me an amusing fact. Some of them are so obsessed with the so-called western view of it that an easterner’s story is suspected to begin with. Zen is not a closed system but a gate to an open cosmos of values which are being progressively unveiled to the eye of insight. Whether or not it is connected with what is not Zen has been the author’s concern for some years.

Misuse of power is the most horrible thing we discern anywhere in history. Hence our interest in love or Zen. We would not like to be victims of cold, cynical, cruel exploitation. Love for oneself is the commonest fact we observe day by day. Even the most wicked criminal loves himself or his child. This love, although it is of an extremely limited application, has something to do with altruism which a sage lived. Herein is the value of Jesus’ utterance, Love your neighbor as yourself, or of Buddha’s teaching, Be compassionate toward your enemy as if he were your dearest son, Rahula. Christian ethic and Zen deed are unusually persistent appeals to have the circle of love or compassion expanded infinitely beyond that of egotism. The difference between egotism and altruism is not so much of a kind as of a width. Both are akin to each other because they deal with either one person or a large number of persons.

The ethic of power is qualitatively different from egotism and altruism. It is love of power and not of persons. Throughout history, since those prehistoric monsters ruined themselves through their naive dependence upon their own power, many men and nations of power have ultimately ruined themselves because of their self-destructive attempt to have more and more power at the expense of amicable coexistence which should prevail among various members of the world. Love of power is like a fatal disease like cancer. Once it takes its rise in the heart of the victim it ruins him from inside himself. It makes him forget, one by one, ideals such as truth-finding, beauty-achieving, peace-making, love of God and persons. This disease becomes more and more serious until at last he comes to miss the lesson of history to the effect that he who wields his power-weapon against God and men will eventually perish by the very weapon on which he depends. This disease is so strong that some unusually decisive medicine like love or Zen is needed.

Love and Zen are so extremely noble that many folk laugh at them. But these extremely noble ethics may be exactly what we need, especially in this age of power, so that the dangerous ethic of power may be counteracted even a little, if not completely. This is the justification of our looking at love and Zen. Kipling views history from the point of view of humility before God:

"… Drunk with the sight of power …

Tumult and shouting dies

Captains and kings depart.

Still stands thine ancient sacrifice:

An humble and a contrite heart."

We believe in God, whose will is disclosed in the rare ethic of altruism. Herein is the hope of the world, which is torn by tensions and terrors today, when the possible misuse of the greatest power released in history terrifies us as we think carefully about the true nature of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Anything is dangerous if it tempts men to gain power and use it for an egotistic purpose. Too many helpless men in society weep, suffer, die, because they are too weak to insist on their own right. Too many people and nations have drenched history in blood because of the misuse of their power. Our nuclear age may be the end of history if atomic power be misused.

Thus the ethic of power, which says that might makes right, is here suspected gravely. On the contrary a rare, noble ethic like love or Zen is going to be examined seriously. Love is as different from Zen as the mountain peak is different from the wide ocean. But they belong to the same world in which God is.

The ethic of power is far more different from both love and Zen. It belongs to another realm, which is a veritable Hades. We do know exactly where the realm of mutual diatribe and destruction is situated … in us and the enemy of ours. How different it is from the sacrificial death of love and the Zen inclusion of the so-called enemy in the circle of boundless compassion.

President Joseph E. McCabe of Coe College gives me the honor of studying and teaching in his college as Visiting Professor in Non-Western Studies for 1964–65. The news of a large number of students who have pre-registered for my courses has reached me from Dean Howard S. Greenlee this summer. So a happy concern as to how I could supply them with adequate reading material has urged me hurriedly to write an essay on Zeal for Zen. Since I wrote two other essays, Thought Seeing in Japan, and Ways to Peace, my thought seems to have changed somewhat, thus making it necessary to write a new essay. Since July 25 when I began to take up my pen I have had an exhilarating time despite the terrific heat of midsummer. Nothing is more enjoyable than the attempt to frame groups of sentences about the challenging thought which has been in the mind for a long time. This room on the second floor of my house surrounded by green trees and cicada music, has been a veritable heaven for me these days.

I am profoundly grateful to all those kind people, especially Doctor and Mrs. Francis W. Pritchard, friends of mine in Christ, throughout the past 28 years, who have stimulated me to do this writing.

Keenly do I appreciate the rare kindness of President Nobushige Ukai, Vice Presidents Daishiro Hidaka, Everett Kleinjans and Hallam Shorrock and other members of the Administration of ICU, Chairman Dr. Tateo Kanda and members of its Humanities Division, through which I am having a leave of absence so that my daughter Noriko and I may be at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Coe College is situated.

Norimoto Iino

Zen Explained

Some of the most important words we know are monosyllabic: love, peace, truth, bliss, God, man, world, law, yes, no, and so on. I am blessed to be in Coe College, and not in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There is power in brevity, which is a bliss for us students.

Zen is a monosyllabic word which is being talked about from time to time. There is much zeal for Zen among some people because it is alleged to bring peace, bliss, integrated personality even in a place like Tokyo today when we are impinged upon by noise and nonsense, speed and superficiality, division and dismay, failure and frustration, fear and fragmentariness, tension and terror, madness and meaninglessness, hatred and hopelessness. Not only in Japan but also in America and Europe there seems to be some interest in Zen. This course is to examine whether or not such a zeal is justifiable.

Here we must define Zen. It has been interpreted in so many different ways that we need a preliminary or heuristic definition of it before learning from Zen masters like Buddha (463–383 B.C.), Nyojo (1163–1228), Dogen (1200–1253), Suzuki (1871–1966), Oka (1901——). Zen means disclosure of the true self through the most comprehensive grasp of life, or a man’s noblest mood. It is the whole truth, important facets of which are grasped coherently. This grasp is not so much intellectual as intuitive, intimate, and inspiring. It is a religious insight into a hitherto-concealed cosmos of ideals like boundless compassion and self-renouncing mercy such that a person becomes thoroughly altruistic by discerning this cosmos, disclosing itself in himself and in the milieu which surrounds him. The cosmos of compassion thus disclosed makes the seer a transformed man of sympathy and serenity, radiance and resourcefulness. Thus he will go beyond greed, anger, complaint. Creativity, joy, poise, exhilaration will fill his whole being.

The astronomical universe or mathematical world is invisible to those who are obsessed with the testimony of