Zen and the West

So the question we come to now, is well, how do you go about knowing the field of forces in which you live? How do you know which way the wind is blowing so you can sail properly, when it isn’t as simple a matter of wetting your finger and holding it up to see which side gets cold first, and that’s where the wind’s coming from. Or is it as simple as that? We know, or think we know, that nature is extraordinarily complicated, and so very difficult to understand. And if you can’t understand an immensely complicated situation it’s very difficult to make decisions about it.

But, there is a point of view from which nature is not complicated, and that, to an educated westerner, may sound quite astonishing. When Buddhists speak in their philosophy about the world of form, and the world that is formless, these two categories translate roughly to the world as complicated and the world as simple. What makes the world complicated is not it’s actual physical structure, but an attempt to understand it in a certain way. When you ask: “How does it work?” “Why does it do it?” then you start analyzing a flower, a body, an geological structure, and you are asking the question, really: “How can I reproduce in words or numbers what is going on here?”