Zen Masters Of China. Richard Bryan McDaniel

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       by

       Albert Low, LLD.,

       Director and Teacher, Montreal Zen Center

      According to the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.” The stories that follow in this book address those reasons of the heart. For thousands of years human beings have used stories to convey a message that the intellect can neither grasp nor communicate. Perhaps the earliest of these was the story of Gilgamesh. Since then the Hindus (through the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavad Gita forms a part), the Sufis (through the stories of Mullah Nasrudin), Jesus (through his many parables), the Hassidic Jews, and the Chinese (through koans and mondo), and countless others have taught the wisdom of the heart to an ever receptive humanity.

      Why should stories be able to do what even the keenest intellect is unable to achieve? Why do spiritual teachers of all kinds resort to stories to get across subtle yet vitally important teachings?

      It is a matter of common knowledge that the mind operates on at least two different levels, a so-called “conscious” level and an “unconscious” level. In the West this is a comparatively recent discovery made popular by Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytical school of psychology. But in the East the idea of a Higher Self, an Over Self, or a True Self that presides over and gives direction to a lower self has been present since the beginning of civilization.

      Generally speaking, for the Westerner, the unconscious is considered to be inferior to the conscious mind. As Freud would have it, “Where there is id there shall be ego.” The picture that Freud drew of the client’s ego absorbing or reclaiming the unconscious was similar to the one we have of the Dutch with their system of dikes and dams reclaiming the land from the Zuider Zee. Jung drew a radically different picture of the unconscious that was more favorably inclined towards it. The unconscious, according to Freud, was a sea of dark, uncontrolled passions ready to erupt into consciousness with dire results. But Jung saw it more as a repository of ancient wisdom in the form of Archetypes. Nevertheless, he was still inclined to put the conscious mind in the role of the director whose function it was to interpret and make sense of the messages received from the unconscious.

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