Pounders: >I remember reading _Zen..._, which I found incredibly >tiresome; as the endless Hakiu generated by poets here >in the States show, there's a very fine line between >conveying Taoist or Zen Buddhist thought and boring the >reader silly. If I knew Chinese or Japanese, I might >be able to say that it's a barrier of the language, but >as things go, it seems that the "dilutions" made for >Western consumption always twist things enough towards >the outwardly comprehensible that they become show pieces. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was almost a good book, but as I recall it attempted to explain Zen through Western philosophy, and just didn't get me as much as I thought it would. I quit reading it in the section about gumption, of all places. and as for the differences between Asian culture and the use of Zen and Taoism in America and the rest of the West, as long as we're mentioning Alan Watts, he wrote an article that's now been published in the end of Penguin's Portable Beat Reader. The article is called Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen. It divides up Zen into Eastern culture and Western (this is a very simplistic paraphrase: forgive me), and then within Western Culture further into Beat and Square. What does this all mean? It means that in America there are pretty much two kinds of Zen: one is Square, in which the American followers turn to Japanese Samurai-style rigid Zen to supplant their need for ritual, ceremony, order, etc, unsatisfied with Western culture and Christianity. This is fine, of course, but the problem is that it treats Zen as filling a gap created by existence in western culture, which is the need for order, and pretty antithetical to the real essence of Zen. But these Squares are dilligent and sit and meditate for hours and think they're being very good at trying for englightenment, but still you get the feeling they'd be just as happy being Catholic priests and having most of the decisions made for them already. They've drained the spontaneity out of it (this may of course have something to do with how Zen in Japan adapted from Chan in China to fit Japanese culture better, but more so it has to do with the different background a westerner has from an easterner). The other type is Beat Zen, which is the Zen a lot of westerners think of when we think of Zen, propagated most obviously by Ginsburg (anyone notice that in WCW's introduction to Howl he speaks nothing of the poem except to call it "arresting", and spends the rest of the small page talking about Ginsburg's strength as a person. . . ?) and Kerouac, which is the moving to Zen to justify and facilitate a rebellion against Western culture and Christianity. so this is fine too, but it's the opposite symptom of the same problem the Squares have. The two biggest problems are that Zen spends a lot of time deconstructing oppositions, and a rebellion against western culture just doesn't fit that philosophy. more importantly, the Beats went to Zen to justify themselves and their hedonism (why not just go to Hedonism for that, I wonder? anyhow. . .), but how can you have a student looking for self-justification in a philosophy that DOESN'T BELIEVE IN THE SELF?? So instead of changing their own attitudes towards life and Zen, the Beats ended up changing Zen. Zen ultimately is not about rebellion or rigidity, and Watts's essay suggests that to be an American and also a Zen student, you have to know Western culture so well and so fully and be so comfortable with it that in going to Zen you are neither supplanting nor rebelling against your own culture's predicaments and results embodied in your life. >What was it that Stravinsky said about his _Firebird_? >"I felt as if it had stamped on the side, _Russian: For >Export Only_". I wonder if anyone on the list can talk >about their experiences translating Taoist texts such >as the Tao Te Ching. Language is of course a big stumbling block in the transmission of Taoism. I for one began studying Chinese because the various translations in English were inadequate. And while I haven't translated any more than a sentence or two of the Tao Te Ching in english, I have read some of it in the original, and know that there's a ton more ambiguity--purposeful ambiguity, ambiguity meant to evade logic and call attention to the impossibility of language to convey the world--in the Chinese than even seems possible in english. For instance, the first sentence "Dao ke dao, fei chang dao" could mean anything from The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao, to The Tao that can be spoken is not commonly spoken, or never spoken, to Tao can be Tao, but not the eternal Tao, to no one knows how many other possibilities. One I came across that I kind of like for the sake of the pun is The Way that can be weighed is not the eternal Way, but that's not good enough in other senses. so what do you do? If you care enough, you learn the language. if you don't, then you read as many translations as possible and assume that even if you do learn classical Chinese, you still won't be able to figure it all out. which is of course the point. Lucas . . Lucas Klein [log in to unmask] 8080,8080,0000A young Muse with young loves clustered about her ascends with me into the æther, . . . And there is no high-road to the Muses. 0000,8080,0000 Ezra Pound, Homage to Sextus Propertius