Another look at Alan Watts' beat and square Zen including Zen

Alan Watts' essay, Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen, published in the spring of 1958 in the Chicago Review, takes a look at "beat Zen" and "square Zen". Both beat and square Zen, it is fair to say, constitute a negative reaction to Zen's mystery: a mystery which never ceases to escape culture's iron cage. If we bear in mind that according to Watts, "Zen is above all the Liberation of the mind from conventional thought", neither the beat anti-culturist nor the square culturalist has a nose for authentic Zen, nor a legitimate claim to represent it.

The beat mentality according to Watts is "a revolt which does not seek to change the existing order but simply turns away from it to find the significance of life in subjective experience rather then objective achievement." Finding consolation in Zen, the beat Zennist imagines to have obtained a license if not to mention a justification for almost any kind of peak subjective experience as being satori. It is somewhat different for the square Zennist.

The square Zennist Watt's informs us is on "a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approved and established authority. There will even be certificates to hang on the wall." Elaborating on what Watts said, square Zen places a great deal of emphasis on institutional conformity and authority held to be 'tradition' (C., tsung). But behind this, the history of Zen and its literature paints a somewhat different picture. It not the picture of a great institution like the Catholic Church but one of awakened beings who have beheld the same transcendent medium as the Buddha; who have in a nutshell, awakened to absolute Mind.

Summing up the two Zens, Watts observes:

"Thus for beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori or to be anything but what one is. But for square Zen there can ! be no tr ue satori without years of meditation-practice under the stern supervision of a qualified master."

As for the third Zen which Watts doesn't seem to take up although it is mentioned in the title, this is not Zen in the abstractthis is Zen that has been handed down to us in literature which paradoxically is always pointing to that which transcends the Buddhist canon, namely, the Buddha's very own enlightenment. This, to be sure, is a profound mystery which goes beyond the subjective pale of human experience and its institutions; which is the heart of Zen.


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