charity. Certain books are taken as representing a divine revelation; all other books of religion are judged by this arbitrary standard, and whatever does not agree with it is rejected. The letter of Scripture has always proved to be a fruitful mother of controversy and dissension. The Zen has no special list of Sacred Books. It does not reject any Sutras or Abhidharmas; it reads and values them for all the truths they contain, but it sets up no books as being infallible or beyond criticism. It criticizes freely all the Sacred Books of Buddhism; and it accepts, with equal freedom and reverence, the good books of all countries.

It has been said already that Zen, whilst rejecting a personal God, accepts with reverence a Something Beyond Knowledge, which lies at the back of phenomenal existence. We can never know that Being in its entirety, but we can reach to Him in three ways--"feeling after Him, and, haply, finding Him." We may look into our own hearts, by introspection and meditation, and there we shall find Him. We may look into the hearts of others by means of the Word, spoken or written, and there we shall find Him. We may look at Nature, in all its manifestations, romantic or commonplace, and there we shall find Him. For my heart is Buddha; and the heart of my brother whose books I read, is Buddha; and Nature in its entirety, the Infinitely Great, the Infinitely Small, every star or comet, every mountain range or ocean, every insect, every leaf, is Buddha.

Such is the faith of the Zenshuist. For his daily conduct he accepts no infallible guide but his own enlightened conscience, which is one with the enlightened conscience of the universe. For the details, however, of his behaviour he will follow Confucius, S'akyamuni, Epictetus, anything that will help him to lead his daily life in a manner worthy of a religious philosopher.

The Zen, as taught by its Japanese founders, Eisai and Dogen, and as fostered by the wise counsels of the Hojo regents, was quite a different religion from the miracle-mongering, worldly, intriguing parody of religion which the Hosso, Kegon, Tendai, and Shingon had been palming off on the country to the obvious disgust of the warrior and the man of action. It was very different, again, from the pietistic solifidianism of Honen and Shinran, with its contempt for this world and its fixed gaze upon the joys of the Western Paradise. The Zen fired the imagination of the warrior, the statesman, the man of letters, and if Japanese art drew its inspiration from the wild fancies of Kegon and Shingon Buddhology, Japanese poetry drew it from the solid quietude of the Zen monasteries, where it was taught to look "within," into the heart and into the innermost shrine of Nature, and there to be comforted by the One, Omnipresent, Heart of Buddha, whom man can feel but not know.

Footnotes