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In it, RH Blyth looks for the sublime, and the zen(nnish) in English literature. He includes Don Quixote as well, and includes numerous examples from Chinese and Japanese poetry and literature. I love this book, but unfortunately it is out of print. I have two hard copies of my own, but a version can be found here –
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=30475595 (Which doesn’t include illustrations and Japanese/Chinese script AFAIK, and it’s never the same to read something online)
Quote:In English Literature we find expression of the Zen attitude
towards life most consistently and purely in Shakespeare,
Wordsworth, Dickens and Stevenson. Arnold says, “The
strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry,”
and this is true of any religion at any time in the history of
the world. The word “unconscious” implies that the poetry
is taken unawares, that it is unrecognised as such, as, for ex-
ample, in Dickens; that what is believed is the poetry, and not
the intellectual concepts involved in it. It is of the essence of
poetry that it points to Something, just as (to use a favourite
Buddhist simile,) the finger points to the moon. This some-
thing, though instantly recognised, is not to be defined.
We say amisse
This or that is;
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
For Buddhism or Christianity, the “word” ( Zen) of both is the
same. On the one hand, it is the attainment of freedom, a
state in which we can say, as Beatrice said to Virgil,
Io son fatta da Dio, sua mercè, tale,
Che la vostra miseria non mi tange,
Nè fiamma d’esto incendio non m’assale.
Inferno, II, 91-93.
I am made of God, through His Grace,
Such that your misery touches me not,
Nor does flame of that burning assail me.
On the other hand, it is the salvation of mankind by our
vicarious suffering:
She sees her Son, her God,
Bow with a load of borrowed sins; and swim
In woes that were not made for him.
Literature, especially poetry, has this same double, para-
doxical nature as religion, and it is the main theme of Zen in
English Literature, that where there is religion there is poetry,
where there is poetry there is religion; not two things in close
association, but one thing with two names.
“Zen in EnglishLiterature” means Zen in English Poetry, that is, Poetry as
English Zen. The false religious and the false poetical life are
equally one: a wallowing in God, a vague and woolly panthe-
ism, nightingales and roses.
If anything in so-called poetry, if anything in Buddhism or Christianity will not stand the test
of reality, the test of Zen,
What will not hold Perfection, let it burst!
Look, for example, at Cowper’s verse:
Can a woman’s tender care
Cease toward the child she bare?
Yes, she may forgetful be,
Yet will I remember thee.
When we read this, we know, with the immediacy that is the
hall-mark of absolute knowledge, that it is true.
Truth is the trial of itself,
And needs no other touch.
But who or what is this “I” that never forgets, that numbers
the hairs of our heads and turns them white with the years,
that “loves” us all without discrimination, that brings us into
being and then, sooner or later, murders us? Zen alone can
answer such a question. The answer is,
Can a woman’s tender care
Cease toward the child she bare?
Yes, she may forgetful be,
Yet will I remember thee.
Quote:There is only one thing more dismal than an anthology of
religious poetry, and that is a book of jokes. This is not be-
cause religious poetry is on the whole poor in quality, both as
religion and as poetry, but because “it has designs upon us,”
like the book of jokes. It wants to push us into the arms of
Jesus; it wants to push us off this planet into space, into in.
finity, into eternity. Once you understand that religion is
poetry and poetry is religion, you can never talk about “re-
ligious” poetry, you can never take religion and poetry to be
two different things, as Professor Suzuki does in his Zen Bud-
dhism and its Influence on Japanese Culture.
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