What do you think?
Rate this book
Zen and Zen Classics Vol. 1
Zen & Zen Classics, Volume 1 (View amazon detail page) 0893462055
211 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1960
30 people are currently reading
172 people want to read
About the author
R.H. Blyth
78 books40 followersReginald Horace Blyth was an English author, interpreter, translator, devotee of Japanese culture and English Professor, having lived in Japan for eighteen years.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 18, 2024
At one point in my mid-thirties I believe I owned all the volumes in this series, but (now that I’ve found it again on Kindle) I remember that this one was my favourite. What a pleasure it is to reread it after forty years!
Blyth’s eye and ear for telling detail are acute and, having studied Zen Buddhism many years ago in the Orient, he had, by time of writing, obviously become one with its primary principle: Sunyata, or Emptiness.
That takes much acumen combined with great good fortune.
We are all mental chatterboxes by birth and conditioning. Our infantile trauma was appropriately knocked into shape by the rote and regimen of our school career.
At the point of our final graduation we have highly-developed idiosyncratic problems with accepting a rigidly objective worldview. And that’s a good reason for the necessity of quantum mechanics, for we each have a distinct way of observing the world around us.
The world is mystical, and we are not. All our music has been drummed out of our systems by our hard knocks. We cannot see the vastness of the world or the sense of that simple tenet of mysticism recorded by T.S. Eliot: “and all is always NOW (antedating Eckhart Tolle by half a century).”
So Zen adjusts our inner vision. And after long periods of much HARDER knocks we suddenly see the universe in a grain of sand. As happened to me this weekend...
Let me paraphrase that experience using Blyth’s own words: it seems one day, in ancient China, a master and his student were talking -
‘Sengtsan went to his master Huike and said, “I am diseased: I implore you to cleanse me of my sin.”
Huike said, “Bring me your sin and I will cleanse you of it.”
Sengtsan thought awhile, then said, “I cannot get at it.”
Huike replied, “Then I have cleansed you of it.”’
And Sengtsan saw his own Sunyata.
Blyth then comments adroitly on the reason for Sengtsan’s enlightenment: “As soon as we are aware of our own irresponsibility, all the cause of our misbehaviour disappears insofar as the cause (the illusion of self) is removed.”
And now to my own experience: on Saturday a primary fixture of our home had gone unserviceable. Panicking, I suddenly realized I had a warranty with its installer. I contacted the firm and was told a technician from our biggest gas company would arrive around dinner time.
When the technician arrived, he seemed more interested in his cell phone than my problem. As I spoke he wasn’t listening to the circumstances I related of my actions before the unserviceability of the equipment took place.
The bottom line is, his inattention had made my words opaque to his ears and he told me he couldn’t help me. But when an alternate technician from another company was called he, by contrast, listened to me intently. Through attention, he solved my conundrum without looking at the equipment.
He fixed it mentally.
Now, to me, the kind of irresponsibility shown by the first technician reminded me of something traumatic in my own life. For it had hit me with all the force of the original trauma: to whit, the irresponsibility I had shown when I was ill-treated, fifty years ago.
An irresponsibility that (I now saw) mirrored that technician’s! You see, I had veered from responsibility so many times in my life it had become a habit.
So, even though I had had a radical intuition of Being a month prior to my own break with good behaviour, I couldn’t repeat the healing experience of that defining instant of Sunyata, simply because my habitual thinking path has always been to endlessly mentally digress (as you can see my reviews) and thus AVOID REALITY.
Irresponsibility and panic.
I believe we ALL do that. Sengtsan and I are droplets in an ocean of misunderstanding, misunderstood souls. And we ALL miss the mark.
For not only do we think mistakenly that we all have a self, but we believe that self is the be-all and end-all.
It’s not, you know... for by attention we see:
It’s Sunyata.
EMPTINESS. And it shows us the root of all our anxiety.
Everything is vast emptiness and everything is New.
And all it takes to see that is to PAY ATTENTION.
Blyth’s eye and ear for telling detail are acute and, having studied Zen Buddhism many years ago in the Orient, he had, by time of writing, obviously become one with its primary principle: Sunyata, or Emptiness.
That takes much acumen combined with great good fortune.
We are all mental chatterboxes by birth and conditioning. Our infantile trauma was appropriately knocked into shape by the rote and regimen of our school career.
At the point of our final graduation we have highly-developed idiosyncratic problems with accepting a rigidly objective worldview. And that’s a good reason for the necessity of quantum mechanics, for we each have a distinct way of observing the world around us.
The world is mystical, and we are not. All our music has been drummed out of our systems by our hard knocks. We cannot see the vastness of the world or the sense of that simple tenet of mysticism recorded by T.S. Eliot: “and all is always NOW (antedating Eckhart Tolle by half a century).”
So Zen adjusts our inner vision. And after long periods of much HARDER knocks we suddenly see the universe in a grain of sand. As happened to me this weekend...
Let me paraphrase that experience using Blyth’s own words: it seems one day, in ancient China, a master and his student were talking -
‘Sengtsan went to his master Huike and said, “I am diseased: I implore you to cleanse me of my sin.”
Huike said, “Bring me your sin and I will cleanse you of it.”
Sengtsan thought awhile, then said, “I cannot get at it.”
Huike replied, “Then I have cleansed you of it.”’
And Sengtsan saw his own Sunyata.
Blyth then comments adroitly on the reason for Sengtsan’s enlightenment: “As soon as we are aware of our own irresponsibility, all the cause of our misbehaviour disappears insofar as the cause (the illusion of self) is removed.”
And now to my own experience: on Saturday a primary fixture of our home had gone unserviceable. Panicking, I suddenly realized I had a warranty with its installer. I contacted the firm and was told a technician from our biggest gas company would arrive around dinner time.
When the technician arrived, he seemed more interested in his cell phone than my problem. As I spoke he wasn’t listening to the circumstances I related of my actions before the unserviceability of the equipment took place.
The bottom line is, his inattention had made my words opaque to his ears and he told me he couldn’t help me. But when an alternate technician from another company was called he, by contrast, listened to me intently. Through attention, he solved my conundrum without looking at the equipment.
He fixed it mentally.
Now, to me, the kind of irresponsibility shown by the first technician reminded me of something traumatic in my own life. For it had hit me with all the force of the original trauma: to whit, the irresponsibility I had shown when I was ill-treated, fifty years ago.
An irresponsibility that (I now saw) mirrored that technician’s! You see, I had veered from responsibility so many times in my life it had become a habit.
So, even though I had had a radical intuition of Being a month prior to my own break with good behaviour, I couldn’t repeat the healing experience of that defining instant of Sunyata, simply because my habitual thinking path has always been to endlessly mentally digress (as you can see my reviews) and thus AVOID REALITY.
Irresponsibility and panic.
I believe we ALL do that. Sengtsan and I are droplets in an ocean of misunderstanding, misunderstood souls. And we ALL miss the mark.
For not only do we think mistakenly that we all have a self, but we believe that self is the be-all and end-all.
It’s not, you know... for by attention we see:
It’s Sunyata.
EMPTINESS. And it shows us the root of all our anxiety.
Everything is vast emptiness and everything is New.
And all it takes to see that is to PAY ATTENTION.
September 9, 2023
RapGenius for the enlightened mind.
Blyth begins with a brief, but thorough summary of the history of Zen thought, expounding upon its Hindu (and later) Buddhist origins.
He then presents three works “The Hsinhsinming”, “The Chengtaoke”, and “The Platform Sutra”.
These works are first broken down line by line with commentary from Blyth, allowing one to stop and think properly about each line (much like how the website RapGenius breaks down thought-provoking song lyrics into more digestible pieces). The works are then presented in their entirety so you can appreciate them for their literary value.
This is perhaps one of the best presentations of Zen poetry that I have seen; and it is perfectly catered towards the western reader, without feeling as if it is a watered-down, over-simplified version of the original text.
Blyth begins with a brief, but thorough summary of the history of Zen thought, expounding upon its Hindu (and later) Buddhist origins.
He then presents three works “The Hsinhsinming”, “The Chengtaoke”, and “The Platform Sutra”.
These works are first broken down line by line with commentary from Blyth, allowing one to stop and think properly about each line (much like how the website RapGenius breaks down thought-provoking song lyrics into more digestible pieces). The works are then presented in their entirety so you can appreciate them for their literary value.
This is perhaps one of the best presentations of Zen poetry that I have seen; and it is perfectly catered towards the western reader, without feeling as if it is a watered-down, over-simplified version of the original text.
January 5, 2025
Humorous dated book about Zen. Filled with name dropping references to a wide variety of authors from Emerson to Marcus Aralious. Not the best book on Zen, certainly, but a good read. Dated, but very funny at times.
Would mildly recommend.
Would mildly recommend.
December 18, 2024
I remember loving this book so much when I first found it and read it in the eighties. That I didn't love it quite so much this time has to be a result of the post-election malaise I feel right now.
What do I remember loving about it when I first read it? It seemed completely truthful and completely full of contradictory paradox. That, of course, is both completely truthful and completely full of contradictory paradox.
I will try, try, try again as soon as my mood lightens.
What do I remember loving about it when I first read it? It seemed completely truthful and completely full of contradictory paradox. That, of course, is both completely truthful and completely full of contradictory paradox.
I will try, try, try again as soon as my mood lightens.
June 25, 2007
(This review is based on just Vol. 2-3) A great summary of the history of Chinese Zen thinking, presented as a selection of koans featuring the great masters followed by the author's interpretations. The result is the ancient wisdom filtered through a lens of modern philosophical thought (mainly Christian mysticism and existentialism). Probably the closest writing I've found to my own worldview. Unfortunately, this series is long out of print (my copies are from the early '70s). I'm trying to track down Vols. 1, 4 and 5.
October 10, 2013
Sitting Quietly Doing Nothing
Spring Comes and Grass grows by itself.
Spring Comes and Grass grows by itself.
November 20, 2015
Truly poetic
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews