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Article Excerpt
But what drew him with all its power was a tall, light blue flower that stood beside the stream and touched him with its broad, glittering petals. Surrounding it were countless flowers of all colors, and the rare fragrance filled the air. He saw nothing but the blue flower and regarded it for a long while with indescribable tenderness. Finally he made as if to approach it when it suddenly stirred and began to change. The petals became even more brilliant and pressed themselves against the growing stem. The flower inclined towards him, its petals forming a broad blue collar in which a tender face hovered.
--Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1)
All at once, his biographer relates, Bassui felt as though he had "lost his life root, like a barrel whose bottom had been smashed open." Sweat began to pour from every pore of his body, and when he left Koho's room he was in such a daze that he bumped his head several times along the walls trying to find the outer gate of the temple. Upon reaching his hut he wept for hours from his very depths. The tears overflowed, "pouring down his face like rain." In the intense combustion of this overwhelming experience Bassui's previously held conceptions and beliefs, we are told, were utterly annihilated.
--Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen
Introduction
Two scenarios above: the first presents the climax of a lucid dream in which Heinrich, the poet-hero of Novalis' signature novel of German romanticism, experiences an apotheosis of nature centering on the mystical Blue Flower, a mandala whose dynamic perfection of rounded form reveals to him the ecstatic unity of all being. In the second, the medieval Rinzai Zen monk Bassui undergoes the near-violent collapse of an ego-based personality-structure eroded by years of meditation and the consequent influx of an all-pervasive radiance. Though different in particulars (including the difference between fiction and biography), both texts convey the same apocalyptic, life-transforming event, known to Zen as satori and to German romanticism, variously, as die Erleuchtung, romantisieren, or das goldene Zeitalter. This is the summum bonum sought by both these spiritual movements, the goal of all spiritual practice, intellectual inquiry and emotional struggle, the pearl of great price worthy of any sacrifice. It brings with it an absolute freedom empowering one to see anything in one's field of consciousness exactly as it is in itself. It reveals nothing less than the noumenal Ding an sich of Kantian transcendentalism, or, as Zen puts it, things in their exquisite "suchness" (Skt., tathata).
Let us refer to this event in the ensuing discussion as "enlightenment," the term generally used by Westerners to signify the supreme goal of Hindu and Buddhist spiritual practice. It is an apt term inasmuch as many, if not most, such experiences are characterized by those who have them as suffused with a profound sense of light or radiance, albeit a radiance in no way oppressive to one's physical vision. Philip Kapleau, an American Zen master, equates enlightenment with "Self-realization," probably both in Jung's sense of individuation (the maturation and harmonization of psychic forces) and in that of the early Chinese master Hui-neng who characterized the event as "seeing into one's own True Nature." Kapleau goes on to describe enlightenment as "opening the Mind's eye, awakening to one's True-nature and hence of [sic] the nature of all existence" (377).
This much description should be sufficient to convey a sense of enlightenment as it is understood by its devotees, that is, as the ultimate emancipation of human consciousness from the prison of separateness and the pressure of any and all constraint, internal or external. This makes both Jena romanticism and Zen an "argument" in favor of the possibility of "pure" or "direct" experience, of consciousness unfettered by the barest taint of cultural conditioning. Both Novalis and Hui-neng insist that there is such a thing as transcendence and that it is "there for the taking," given the requisite surrender of narrow self-interest.
The above snippet of Bassui's biography may be cited as a case in point: we are told in the last sentence that "[i]n the intense combustion of this overwhelming experience Bassui's previously held conceptions and beliefs [...] were utterly annihilated." Zen masters never tire of insisting that the psychological burning-off of the various layers of the acculturated personality through spiritual practice is both a condition and a (continuing) consequence of the event of enlightenment. To see the world afresh, one needs fresh eyes. Contemporary Japanese master Yasutani puts it this way, with reference to the purgative effects of meditation on the koan "Mu": "You must melt down your illusions with the red-hot iron ball of Mu stuck in your throat. [...] In short, all conceivable ideas are embraced within the term 'illusions' and as such are a hindrance to the realization of your Essential-nature. So dissolve them with the fireball of Mu!" (Kapleau 84). (2)
And yet, neither romanticism nor Zen can be called "otherworldly" Weltanschauungen, especially in the pejorative puritanical sense of a renunciation of this world and its blandishments. On the contrary, each advocates the mind's intimate embrace of its own moment-by-moment experience in whatever way that experience may unfold. Heinrich von Ofterdingen's poetic mentor Klingsohr urges upon his charge an intellectual curiosity towards all facets of nature and culture: "I cannot urge you enough to nourish, with industry and effort, [...] your natural drive to know how things come about and how they fit together" (Novalis, Werke 216). Zen bristles at stereotypical descriptions of itself as metaphysically escapist. Its leading interpreter in the West, the great scholar D. T. Suzuki, once even felt compelled to insist that Zen was "radical realism rather than mysticism" (qtd. in Horgan 227).
This brings us to a paradox: it seems that romanticism and Zen each exalts, in the same breath, both transcendence and immanence, both freedom from the world and involvement in it. How can this be? More pointedly, how can one move freely within one's own culture without getting caught up in the pushes and pulls of that culture, without developing (and suffering) the psychological nexus of attachments called "conditioning?" Both movements assert it is part of the mystery of enlightenment to realize precisely this paradox.
Indeed, this breathtaking paradox alone, the simultaneous embracing of transcendence and immanence, would suffice to make a comparison of romanticism and Zen fascinating to students of comparative culture, (3) but let us consider that this is, after all, but one permutation of an even more fundamental insight common to both: the coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites). William James defines the coincidentia as "[...] a reconciliation [....] as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity" (298). The idea of a state of consciousness that can get underneath the mind's automatic categorical bifurcation of reality (inside/outside, true/false, beautiful/ugly, etc.), including even its self-bifurcation into subject and object, and seize the world directly in its primordial wholeness, is the driving power of both romanticism and Zen. Thus the coincidentia is a Western name for enlightenment, the radiance that manifests itself when the pairs of opposites reveal their intrinsic unity. (4) It is on this basis of their common groundedness in the mystical "first principle" of the coincidentia oppositorum that a comparison between romanticism and Zen becomes truly compelling. The remainder of this essay is an adumbration of such a comparison. (5)
The Coincidence of Opposites
The coincidentia asserts--romanticism and Zen would say "reveals"--that the manifest universe is a nexus of polarities that body forth from an abysmal...
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