Questions to Master Deshimaru

Question

It is often said that Buddhism is the Middle Way, the way of balance, but in the West the middle way means middle-class morality. Can you say something about the "middle way" in Zen?

Answer

The middle way does not mean finding yourself between two pretty women and kissing both of them. That's not it. Nor is the middle way cowardice, fear, and inertia; it is not tepid and indecisive. Do not misunderstand it: it embraces opposites, it integrates and goes beyond all contradictions, it is beyond every dualism, even beyond every synthesis. The final verse of the Hannya Shingyosutra is "Go, go, beyond, together, beyond the beyond to the shore of satori, to the wisdom of the Buddha'' - that is, the concrete intuition of the fundamental unity of all things: subject and object, body (or matter) and spirit, form and void. In Buddhism the middle way means not setting up an oposition between subject and object. The chief characteristic of European civilization is dualism. Materialism, for example, is opposed to spiritualism. Westerners are very fond of doctrines, of isms. Buddhism, they say, and Christianity. Their isms express the relative positions of what are taken to be distinct entities, but in reality the material and spiritual are one and cannot stand in opposition to each other. Both materialism and communism have opposed Christianity; but communism is not complete either, because it looks only at the material aspect of things, while Christianity looks only at the spiritual aspect and is just as incomplete. Some Christians are different, but for most traditional Christians their religion has to do with the spirit only. Spirit or mind and body are one thing, like the two sides of a sheet of paper. In everyday life they cannot be separated. One person is drawn to the mental or spiritual, another to the material or physical. If you want to understand, you must find the middle way. Spiritual is material and material becomes spiritual. Mind exists in every one of our cells and ultimately mind itself is body and the body itself is mind. The only things left in the end are activity and energy; they are not dualistic. The middle way integrates everything The highest dimension of all is mushotoku, the middle way. Zen is the middle way. But you must not misunderstand the word "middle": it means, in regard to material and spiritual, that you must embrace both, like the front and back of a sheet of paper. That's what makes Zen hard to understand. The middle way is the way beyond. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: that is the form in which reasoning in the West is always set out. If material = thesis and spiritual = antithesis, then Zen lives the middle way, that of synthesis. Beyond synthesis.