water.  The present writer knows a contemporary Zenist who would not drink even a cup of water without first making a salutation to it.  Such an attitude of Zen toward things may well be illustrated by the following example:  Sueh Fung (Sep-po) and Kin Shan (Kin-zan), once travelling through a mountainous district, saw a leaf of the rape floating down the stream.  Thereon Kin Shan said:  “Let us go up, dear brother, along the stream that we may find a sage living up on the mountain.  I hope we shall find a good teacher in him.”  “No,” replied Sueh Fung, “for he cannot be a sage who wastes even a leaf of the rape.  He will be no good teacher for us.”

8.  Zen is not Nihilistic.

Zen judged from ancient Zen masters’ aphorisms may seem, at the first sight, to be idealistic in an extreme form, as they say:  “Mind is Buddha” or, “Buddha is Mind,” or, “There is nothing outside mind,” or, “Three worlds are of but one mind.”  And it may also appear to be nihilistic, as they say:  “There has been nothing since all eternity,” “By illusion you see the castle of the Three Worlds”; “by Enlightenment you see but emptiness in ten directions."[FN#194] In reality, however, Zen[FN#195] is neither idealistic nor nihilistic.  Zen makes use of the nihilistic idea of Hinayana Buddhism, and calls its students’ attention to the change and evanescence of life and of the world, first to destroy the error of immutation, next to dispel the attachment to the sensual objects.

[FN#194] These words were repeatedly uttered by Chinese and Japanese Zenists of all ages.  Chwen Hih (Fu-dai-shi) expressed this very idea in his Sin Wang Ming (Shin-o-mei) at the time of Bodhidharma.

[FN#195] The Rin-zai teachers mostly make use of the doctrine of unreality of all things, as taught in Prajnya-paramita-sutras.  We have to note that there are some differences between the Mahayana doctrine of unreality and the Hinayana doctrine of unreality.

It is a misleading tendency of our intellect to conceive things as if they were immutable and constant.  It often leaves changing and concrete individual objects out of consideration, and lays stress on the general, abstract, unchanging aspect of things.  It is inclined to be given to generalization and abstraction.  It often looks not at this thing or at that thing, but at things in general.  It loves to think not of a good thing nor of a bad thing, but of bad and good in the abstract.  This intellectual tendency hardens and petrifies the living and growing world, and leads us to take the universe as a thing dead, inert, and standing still.  This error of immutation can be corrected by the doctrine of Transcience taught by Hinayana Buddhism.  But as medicine taken in an undue quantity turns into poison, so the doctrine of Transcience drove the Hinayanists to the suicidal conclusion of nihilism.  A well-known scholar and believer of Zen, Kwei Fung (Kei-ha) says in his refutation of nihilism:[FN#196]