Alan Watts on the big Self

First written when he was only nineteen, Alan Watts' book, The Spirit of Zen (1935), is a much different book when compared with most books written by contemporary Western Zen writers. At nineteen, Watts apparently did his homework and had enough insight into Buddhism to at least see the scope of Mahayana Buddhism, and on the same track, but more importantly, realize that Mahayana did not deny the Self as did Hinayana Buddhism. He wrote:

"The Mahayana, on the other hand, considers that a true Self is found when the false one is renounced. When man neither identifies himself with his person nor uses it as a means of resisting life, he finds that the Self is more than his own being; it includes the whole universe. The Hinayana, realizing that no single thing as such is the Self, is content with that realization; hence it is a denial of life, conceiving Enlightenment only as the negative attainment of understanding that all separate entities are anattawithout self, and aniccawithout permanence. But the Mahayana completes this denial with an affirmation; while denying the existence of self in any particular thing, it finds it in the total interrelatedness of all things" (The Spirit of Zen (1958), p. 27).

Watts is making sense here. There is much to back this up in a number of Mahayana Sutras such as the Mahaparinirvana and Lankavatara Sutras. Although this book by the young Watts is not perfect, nevertheless for its spirit, it is a much better book than some of the stuff pumped out today which falls under the general category of self-help Zen which a serious student of Zen should avoid. Self-help Zen is not interested in words like these which are from Watts.

In Mahayana philosophy this divinity, the Self, was known as the Buddha-naturethe ultimate, eternal and universal principle of which all things are manifestations. In Sanskrit it is called Tathata or Suchness, a ter! m which has a close affinity with the Chinese Tao or the Way of things. This principle is described as the Buddha-nature because to be a Buddha means that one has realized one's identity with Tathata, with the one true Self which is not conditioned by distinctions between I and You, Me and Mine, This and That (p. 29).

In a word, to study the big Self is to forget the little self that self-help Zennists seem to be wallowing in.