Alan Watts: Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen

Everyone is born a mystic and a lover who experiences the unity of things and all are called to keep this mystic or lover of life alive. – #7 of Matthew Fox’s 95 Theses

In my research I’ve been noticing the Beat poets and writers were definitely mystics “digging” life in their own foray into the forest for the Holy Grail. Kerouac reasserted over and over that “the Beat Generation was basically a religious generation.”

Reading Kerouac, Ginsberg, Whalen, and Synder myself I sense an authentic urge but couldn’t help feeling that sometimes the Zen and the Buddhism was warped a bit, especially from the most notorious Beats. (There weren’t much in way of teachers in the US then, just moldy books in libraries.)

Then I came upon an essay by Alan Watts, born in England he died in the Bay Area – the North Bay of Mill Valley to be precise. His “Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen” essay just gets to the heart of it all. Very enlightening read.

Square Zen is “a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approval and established authority. There will even be certificates to hang on the wall.

Whereas…

For beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori or to be anything but what one is. [He describe its self-defensive underside.] But for square Zen there can be no true satori without years of meditation-practice under the stern supervision of a qualified master.

Watts goes on to masterfully explain why satori “can lie along both roads.”

Ultimately, the ancient Chinese Zen masters practiced everyday Zen, an ordinary “no-fuss” Zen. Fuss comes in when we’re “mixed up with Bohemian affectations, and “fuss” when it is imagined that the only proper way to find it is to run off to a monastery in Japan or to do special exercises in the lotus posture for five hours a day.”

Alan starts and ends with the Tao which is close in essence to the Chinese Zen, or Ch’an. To begin, “Tao is that which one cannot depart. That which one can depart is not the Tao.” And he ends with this Taoist poem.

In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor worse;
The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, some short.

A “Spiritual Radicals” course is being offered by UC Berkeley this spring and fall in San Francisco. From the course Description:

This course introduces students to seven highly original thinkers–J. Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, Ram Dass, Chogyam Trungpa, and Matthew Fox–whose lives and work brought about a renaissance in American spirituality. Authors, scholars, and religious figures, they each journeyed beyond accepted norms and reinvigorated religious practice through the retrieval of ancient wisdom.

They all brought a Beat sensitivity of personal experience as the final authority. And it’s no coincidence that Aldous Huxley opened the doors of perception in 1954 ushering in “Howl” and the sixties’ psychedelic movement. When Allen Ginsberg tired of drugs in his attempt to recapture a natural 1948 peak experience (named it Harlem Vision even) he turned to Chogyam Trungpa as his guru. In separate journeys, Ram Dass (last home Tiberon) and Steve Jobs went in search of the same guru in India. Dass found him, but Steve wandered in India and promptly on his return started tinkering with Apple. Oh, I could go on and on. (These guys ‘cept Matthew Fox are all dead, but there are living breathing radicals right here in our midst today! And no, they’re mostly not celebrities.)

p.s. Looks like Matthew Fox even had a blog for a brief while. Fox is also the founder of the University of Creation Spirituality (now Wisdom University), which was in Oakland and looks to be headquartered in San Francisco now.