In this article from 1967, William (Bill) Johnston, SJ, discusses Christian and Western attitudes towards Zen Buddhism, Jungian analysis of Western attempts to adopt Zen philosophies and practices, and the potential for fruitful dialogue between Christian and Zen practices of prayer.
It is interesting to note the contemporary feel of the opening paragraphs of Johnston’s article, which seem like they could have been written about the cultural anxieties of today; as well as the critiques of a then-burgeoning New Age culture in conflation with the myriad of holistic and spiritualist movements rife in the West of the early 21st century.
Bill Johnston was a Jesuit theologian who spent most of his adult life living, teaching, and studying in Japan. Further information on him can be found in his entry in the Jesuit Archives and his obituaries in The Irish Times and Jesuit.ie.
William Johnston, ‘Zen and the West’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 56, No. 224 (Winter, 1967), 349 – 355. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30087247
In recent times a good deal has been said and written about the cultural crisis in the West; and not infrequently it has been suggested that beneath the surface of Western man there lurks some psychological disease that may well end up by destroying him. One of the first to point a finger at the imbalance of Western man was C. G. Jung who loved to talk about the impoverishment of a West that has ‘lost its myth’; and more recently Karl Stern, following in the footsteps of the great psychologist, has revived the picture of a de-feminized, de-humanized West, rich in technology but desperately poor in intuition, poor in the wisdom called sophia and in what Dr Stern himself calls ‘womanly values’. Thus arises again the spectre of a Nineteen Eighty Four, of a brave new world of robots, of a waste land that is ever more sterile, of a West that is sick from lack of mysticism.
Granted that much of this talk contains exaggeration and even melodrama, it still remains true that the West has for some time been uneasily conscious of its own spiritual poverty. And it is just at this juncture that Zen Buddhism (particularly that of Dr Suzuki) has made its appearance. Into the West has come a religion which is essentially mystical, placing all its emphasis on the enlightenment called satori and offering precisely those values that the West seems to lack. Small wonder that the appeal of ‘the mystic East’ has made itself felt and that not a few Westerners have turned their eyes to Zen in search of something profound that may be able to satisfy their deeper aspirations.
Of the Westerners who in recent years have turned to Zen some have been Christians dissatisfied with a Christianity that often seems too rational, too Cartesian and too juridical; often these people have never had any real experience of Christianity – which, in consequence, seems hollow by comparison with the depth of Zen. It may be that they have been ignorant of the mystical element in Christianity; for it is well known that both Catholics and Protestants have been suspicious of (even hostile towards) mysticism. Catholics have voiced fears about pantheism and quietism: Protestants sometimes look at Western mysticism as a neoplatonic invasion contaminating the pure and limpid stream that flows from the Bible. So it is hardly surprising that people in search of mysticism should be propelled towards the East.
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Much misunderstanding of Zen Buddhism arises from a Western failure to understand that almost all its language is primarily phenomenological or descriptive and that when it speaks of ‘becoming the object’ or ‘becoming the universe’ this is no more than a description of a psychological experience of identification which is deeply embedded in all Japanese culture. (Though it is not limited to Japan alone, for something similar can be found in T. S. Eliot and is described by Jung). What precisely this experience of identity means in the ontological order need not concern us here; suffice it to remark that not all the Zen people will deny the existence of a transcendent God. Suzuki Daisetsu never tires of saying that Zen neither affirms nor denies God – it is indifferent to God. And Père Charles grasped this in advance of his times when he remarked: ‘In neither of the two vehicles has the place of God been usurped. It is empty, like a pedestal without a statue’.
For it should be noted that Buddhism does not begin with a Genesis-like affirmation of the existence of God or of anything else: rather it is a search or quest for a wisdom which only comes at the end, as a climax – nor is it impossible that this quest might end in a discovery of God. At all events, people who have had some experience of speaking with Zen masters have found that while God has no place in the scheme of things His existence is not excluded. Consequently, some Zen masters seem to have a sense of a transcendent Being (even though they may not call this being ‘God’ or ‘Kami’), while others have not…From all this it can be seen how desirable it is to drop Western philosophical terminology and take Zen on its own ground, using existential and descriptive words. If this is done, dialogue can be instituted; and indeed this very dialogue has begun in Japan with considerable prospects of mutual understanding and appreciation.
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Now it seems to me that while Japanese Zen may be of great value to certain individual Westerners…its value for Western people at large is greatly open to question. This, at all events, was the opinion of Jung who rated Zen very highly but deprecated its use in the West. ‘Great as is the value of Zen Buddhism for understanding the religious transformation process’, he wrote, ‘its use among Western people is very problematic.” He held that the mental education necessary for Zen was lacking in the West and that a direct transplantation to Western conditions was neither commendable nor possible…Nor is Jung alone.
The Western interest in Zen has intrigued (and even amused) quite a number of Japanese people; and quite recently an eminent Japanese psychiatrist has examined this phenomenon coming up with interesting conclusions. Dr Takeo Doi maintains that lonely Western man has developed his ego too much, finds that he can no longer cope with the situation he has created, feels an ever-growing insecurity and looks for a solution in the non-ego condition of Zen. ‘It is known,’ he writes, ‘that the West has experienced a great turmoil and confusion, politically as well as culturally, since the beginning of the century. Thus Western people are no more sure of the permanence, if not the rationale, of those values which they have held for centuries. In this predicament, it is interesting that some of them turn to Oriental mysticism, particularly Zen which promises to abolish the appearance of a solitary and anxiety-ridden selfhood alienated from others and from the world’.
So Zen, he says, is an escape from an over-developed self. ‘Since the perception of one’s individual separate self is most disturbing, it has to be dissolved in the feeling of unity with one’s surroundings or with nature’. Zen meditation is the outcome of centuries of tradition. It is not surprising that these two psychologists (one European and the other Japanese) would call into question its direct transplantation to the cultural climate of the West.
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For it is well known that the Western approach to life (owing so much to the Greeks) is intellectual, cerebral, syllogistic. In the realm of prayer, for instance, spiritual writers have ingeniously analysed man’s memory, understanding and will: but they have had little to say about his breathing, his abdomen, his eyes and his hands. The East, on the other hand, still remembers that man can adore God with his whole body and has developed methods of concentration that go back to prehistoric days. And from all this the West can learn much. For surely, as Yeats so truly remarks, the notional assent given to the conclusion of a syllogism often has little real motive power in a man’s life and may be lightly cast aside in moments of emotional crisis; but the conviction conceived in the whole body is less easily lost. If the faith of many moderm Catholics were rooted in the body, it might be less lightly abandoned in his moments of agonised isolation when, like a terrified child, lonely and crushed by the vast universe of outer space, he feels that everything he believed is slipping through his fingers…
…All this naturally leads to the problem of the influence of Zen Buddhism on Western Christianity…they have also been influenced by the real crisis in prayer (part of the general cultural crisis to which I referred at the beginning) which makes people feel, like de Foucauld, that there may be a solution hidden in the mystical tradition of the East. It is not precisely that modern Christians do not want to pray…but that they are too nervous to pray. ‘Teach us to sit still.’ The tempo of life with its crisis upon crisis has created the neurotic uneasiness so conspicuous in modem life. While meditative, discursive prayer is thus rendered difficult, it may well be that there is a certain yearning for a simplified approach to God…
…In the search for a God who is the core of one’s being, the ground of the soul, the essence of all things – in short, the immanent God of the mystics, God who is at the very heart of matter. And if one wants direction in the type of concentration demanded by this simplified approach, it is to the East that one should tum; for, as I have indicated, in the question of technique in simplified, contemplative thought, the West is in its infancy.
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