The Way of Zen by Alan W. Watts Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Way of Zen
Book Review: The Greatest Book I Have Ever Read
Summary: 5 Stars
Buy this book! Its amazing. Watts historical preface to Buddhism aids in its practical understanding. He has a way of getting to the very nature of the Buddhist perspective. Althought not a book for instruction ("Buddhism: Plain & Simple" by Stevn Hagen is a good one) "Way of Zen" is a perfect introduction to Buddhism, its Hindu roots, and more specifically, Zen Buddhism, and its Chinese roots. BUY THIS BOOK.Book Review: The Taboo Against Knowing What Zen Is
Summary: 3 Stars
Everyone is so enthusiastic about this book; I hate to be the wet blanket. Alan Watts is hard not to like, writes attractively and gets full marks for pioneering Taoism, Vedanta and Zen in the West. As a light popular history of Buddhism I don't find much to quarrel with: I'm not aware of too many alternatives.
Watts' own philosophy was expressed in "The Book (on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.)" Pairs of contraries such as light/dark, form/space, self/other, being/non-being, are not enemies but complementaries necessary to each other. Live joyously, with the wisdom and serenity that come from understanding that everything passes, that we are masks the Universe puts on briefly. As a philosophy of life I rate this highly, but it isn't Zen.
In fact Alan Watts was badly wrong about Zen and he created a durable and harmful misconception. He never practised intensively and was acidic about long periods spent "sitting on your (behind)". He saw the regimentation and hours of meditation in Japanese monasteries as the antithesis of carefree Zen, and he misconstrued Chinese Masters or quoted them out of context to prove his point. Back then, he was sure, the Master would just gently explain the contents of "The Book" to his disciple.
This is all so far astray. Chinese Zen monks lived most un-carefree lives: long hours of meditation, long hours of labour, inadequate food and sleep. Zen is not about going with the flow and doin' what comes naturally, rather about uncovering our true Unconditioned nature hidden beneath layers of habit and conditioning. Prolonged meditation happens to be the best way of doing this. Intense effort must be combined with relaxed detachment.
He drops a few clangers, like interpreting the saying that the Zen Master can "snatch away the hungry man's food, drive away the farmer's ox," to mean that the Master is Above Good and Evil. But this is a technical term: it means to rob the student of comforting conceptions and rationalisations, to create a state of helpless bafflement in which true understanding can arise...
Much to enjoy here, then, but also much that's misleading.
Book Review: The Way of Watts
Summary: 4 Stars
Along with Suzuki's work, this book was virtually required reading for a whole generation. It is inimitable Alan Watts material. The good thing about Alan was his ability to debunk the posturing which often passes for spirituality. He made the important point that trying to justify oneself - through Zen, is un-zenlike and therefore, technically stupid.
However, when it comes to practical details, this text is a trifle misleading. Somewhere in its pages, Alan categorically stated that T'ang dynasty Zen monks did not practice Za-zen, as found in Zen temples today - declaring it to be an adjunct of the Sung Confucian education system, incorporated into Japanese temple life. Though the resources at Watts' disposal were somewhat limited - when this text was first written, at least two extant translations (e.g.@Huang Po's 'Discourses' and Hui Hai's 'Treatise on Sudden Awakening') made it clear that - for Zen monks of the Tang dynasty, Za-zen was a regular part of their spiritual life. What we do find stated, in such sources, is a reminder not to take still immobility as the right state or end of the practice. Whether training in the Rinzai or the Soto tradition, few Westerners practicing Zen today will doubt that Za-zen is an essential part of the practice. If you want a readable, general introduction to Far-eastern thought - this is a good place to begin. It is best, perhaps, for its discussion of Zen in the context of Far-eastern art. In other respects, observations like those touched on above, will now make this work seem redundant.
Book Review: The Zen world and the Jewish religious world
Summary: 5 Stars
Once I read this book as a seeking young person, one eager to know every possible way of understanding the world. And this with the hope of coming to the ' Truth'. I remember Watts book on Zen as clear and appealing if never wholly convincing. And this not because of any defect in Watts but because the fundamental thrust of Zen is different as I understand it from what I as a Jewish religious believer fundamentally understand.
Zen does not speak or think about a personal God. It does not speak or think about the Covenant or meeting between God and Man .It has no conception of this kind of personal revelation.
In opposite it seems to be teaching us not to look ' for this kind of thing' And to somehow leave aside the individual private and the collective communal selves and flow into the world of Nature and Being indistinguishable. And even this last phrase is probably wrong for Zen since the speaking about it in this way is again ' categorizing' and ' humanizing' . Zen as I sense Watts presents it wants us to free ourselves from these kinds of aspirations and find our way to an enlightentment which once it is called that is not enlightenment either.
"When you say it's the wrong way, and when you don't say you don't say , so the way the real way is to say and not say, to not say and say , to not say and not say , to say and say- everyday."
The Jewish way is of course to pray three times a day in the very same words other Jews elsewhere and all generations of Jews have prayed"
I am sorry. I know most of the readers of these reviews on Watts book are seeking to better understand Zen. I don't think I have helped you. I think that what I have said is that I recognize that Watts has written a very good book about Zen, but Zen is simply not my cup of chicken soup.
Book Review: Valuable insights for everyday life
Summary: 5 Stars
The author traces the development of Zen through the first four chapters. The reader can thereby gain a perspective about how the practice of Zen is so much influenced by Taoism; how the underlying philosophy can be traced back to the Upanishads; how Mahayana Buddhism derived from the original Buddhism and how it was assimilated in the Far East by the Chinese and Japanese.
My overall impression is that Zen differs from other forms of Buddhism mainly in regard to its practice, and also in its emphatic discouragement of metaphysical speculation. Given the human situation - as described by the mythology of the Upanishads - of being alienated in a state of ignorance and impermanence, how does one proceed? As is evident from the spirit of Zen, one cannot proceed by ignoring the journey and strictly focusing on a goal of liberation. That only results in grasping, in egocentric actions that result in further delusion. Likewise, extensive metaphysical speculation only results in being uselessly caught up in the net of duality in space and time. Rather than such self-consious and goal-setting ego pursuits, Zen has promoted ancient Chinese teachings derived from Taoism, which is a way of liberation based on observations of Nature. It has to do with going with the flow, or a letting go of the mind, with an attentive non-grasping view of the world. It has practical implications for all those activities of regular life and is not solely confined to meditation. Intuition is involved here, divination rather than calculation, which brings the subject closer to the object.
An interesting approach to this idea of "letting go" is found in the chapter "Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing" concerning the human ability of self-reflection. The author uses the analogy of a machine having a feedback system, in which the machine as an example can be regulated for temperature. To arrive at a steady state, a series of adjustments need to be made. But in the efficient use of the machine, there is always a limit to the amount of adjustments before complexity causes a "jittery state". Likewise, in human actions excessive self-reflection can result in a kind of paralysis - a going back and forth and not knowing how to proceed - as in the case of human anxiety. To escape anxiety, there has to be a point of letting go. The essential idea is not to eliminate reflection but not to get blocked, not to reflect about reflecting, which means freeing oneself of the excessive demands of the ego, the "identification of the mind with its own image of itself". But how does one do that? How does one become unblocked? A realization of a paradox appears to be the key here. "The simplest cure is to feel free to block, so that one does not block at blocking."