In like manner our universe appears to us human beings as the phenomenal world or presentation.  It might appear to other creatures of a different mental constitution as something else.  We cannot ascertain how it might seem to Devas, to Asuras, to angels, and to the Almighty, if there be such beings.  However different it might seem to these beings, it does not imply that the phenomenal world is unreal, nor that the realm of reality is unknowable.

‘Water,’ the Indian tradition has it, ’seems to man as a drink, as emerald to Devas, as bloody pus to Pretas, as houses to fishes.’  Water is not a whit less real because of its seeming as houses to fishes, and fishes’ houses are not less real because of its seeming as emerald to Devas.  There is nothing that proves the unreality of it.  It is a gross illusion to conceive reality as transcendental to appearances.  Reality exists as appearances, and appearances are reality known to human beings.  You cannot separate appearances from reality, and hold out the latter as the object of aspiration at the cost of the former.  You must acknowledge that the so-called realm of reality which you aspire after, and which you seek for outside or behind the phenomenal universe, exists here on earth.  Let Zen teachers tell you that “the world of birth and death is the realm of Nirvana”; “the earth is the pure land of Buddha.”

16.  The Four Alternatives and the Five Categories.

There are, according to Zen, the four classes of religious and philosophical views, technically called the Four Alternatives,[FN#201] of life and of the world.  The first is ’the deprivation of subject and the non-deprivation of object’ that is to say, the denial of subject, or mind, or Atman, or soul, and the non-denial of object, or matter, or things—­a view which denies the reality of mind and asserts the existence of things.  Such a view was held by a certain school of Hinayanism, called Sarvastivada, and still is held by some philosophers called materialists or naturalists.  The second is the ’deprivation of object and the non-deprivation of subject’—­that is to say, the denial of object, or matter, or things, and the non-denial of subject, or mind, or spirit-a view which denies the reality of material object, and asserts the existence of spirit or ideas.  Such a view was held by the Dharmalaksana School of Mahayanism, and is still held by some philosophers called idealists.  The third is ’the deprivation of both subject and object’—­that is to say, the denial of both subject or spirit, and of object or matter-a view which denies the reality of both physical and mental phenomena, and asserts the existence of reality that transcends the phenomenal universe.  Such a view was held by the Madhyamika School of Mahayanism, and is still held by some religionists and philosophers of the present day.  The fourth is ’the non-deprivation of both subject and object’—­that is to say, the non-denial of subject and object—­a