1. Intro

Dear Alan,

Sorry to take so very long responding. A few pressures got in the way, and I couldn't begin to answer your Calvinism and Zen question anyway without a deal of thought. As I was writing, it occurred to me that I might usefully copy this material (with your indulgence) to a few others who have some interest in these matters (or at least some curiosity, if not alarm, about where I'm coming from). This consideration accounts for the text falling into a less personal register as it goes on. And is also the reason why I at points seem to be explaining Van Til and Dooyeweerd to you, when you are already more conversant with their thought than I am. Apologies for these things.

As always, I am a bit awestruck at your reading programme! I am, of course, very much on board with your impatience of MacDiarmid's, Sorley's, (and much of that Scottish literary generation's) indulgence of Sovietism. I concur also with your "post tenebras lux" approach. I was reading this morning Psalm 139 -

      If I say, "Surely the darkness will overwhelm me,
          And the light around me will be night,"
       Even the darkness is not dark to You,
          And the night is as bright as the day.
          Darkness and light are alike to You. (vv11,12)

You mention the verse "He has made everything beautiful in its time". Since like you I am a Calvinist and view God as absolutely sovereign, I am predisposed to this affirmation. Yet it remains a sword in my heart nonetheless (I have just discovered that the Chinese character for "endure" - 忍 rěn - features a knife blade - 刃 rèn - over, or in, a heart - 心 xīn). To lift a newspaper or glance at a TV bulletin, or visit a children's hospital precludes any simplistic application of these words. If the verse be true at all (as likewise, if God be sovereign at all) it can only be so on a profounder level of apprehension than is the norm. The attempt to endure trauma while professing the sovereignty of God is difficult enough. To call it "beautiful" seems a step too far.

I checked out the original Hebrew for this word "beautiful". It is "yapheh" יפה, which seems to be a standard enough term for "beautiful", but can also shade into "good" and "excellent". Thus the French Louis Segond version has "Il fait toute chose bonne en son temps". Actually, I'm not sure that takes me much further forward. The American Standard Version is a bit easier to get along with. It has "He has made everything appropriate in its time". In the Septuagint, the term used for "beautiful" here is "kalos". This turns out to be the word Christ uses of Himself and of his demise when He says "I am the good (ο καλος) shepherd. The good (ο καλος) shepherd lays down his life for the sheep" (John 10:11). In Classical Greek "kalos" means "beautiful". Also, "noble","praiseworthy". But most significantly for me, it can also mean"serving a good end or purpose" (Greek-English Lexicon, Liddle, Scott, after Passow).

Having an interest in Chinese, I looked up that language also. In Ecclesiastes it translates the Hebrew "yapheh" with the character for "beautiful" (美 měi) and the character for "good" (好 hǎo) together. In tandem, these characters (美好 měi hǎo) can mean "OK". Maybe that helps me too. Remembering that the character for "beautiful" in Chinese (美 měi) refers to a sheep, I was keen to check whether the Chinese, like the Greek, used the same term in both Ecclesiastes 3:11 and in John 10:11, particularly as the latter verse refers to the Good Shepherd. But no, in John it simply uses the everyday term for "good"- 好 hǎo (the character of which illustrates a woman and child).

Like the King James Version, Scots Gaelic uses "maiseach"("beautiful") for Ecclesiastes 3:11 -

"Rinn E gach nì maiseach na àm fhèin".

and "math" ("good") in John 10:11 -

"Is Mise am buachaille math: leigidh am buachaille math a anam sìos airson nan caorach"

MacBain's Etymological Dictionary does actually suggest a possible common root for "maiseach" and "math", but any link would not be at all apparent to a contemporary Gaelic speaker.

The Ma Nuad Irish Bible takes the American Standard Version route for Ecclesiastes:

And for John 10:11, the Irish goes for

"Mise an sáraoire,
Tugann an sáraoire a bheatha ar son a chaorach"
("I [am] the excellent/ surpassing/ shepherd,
The excellent/ surpassing/ shepherd gives his life for his sheep")

I like the use of that prefix "sár"(common to both Scottish and Irish Gaelic). It's probably co-incidence, but it has an echo in it of the Biblical Hebrew words "sar שר" ("ruler"/ "prince") and "zer זר" (pronounced "zar") meaning "crown"/ "wreath".

So where have we got to? The Greek at least tells us that God has made everything "kalos" in its time, and also that the Shepherd Who is "kalos" lays down His life for the sheep. Thus the death of this Shepherd "serves a good end or purpose". Thus the Cross was supremely yapheh יפה ("beautiful") in its time. And for all time and eternity. Yet who can bear it's horror? Pain is pain. In Gethsemane ("Oil-Press"), Christ recoiled from the prospect of the pain before Him. Certainly, as I think about it, pain accepted as the careful providence of God ("Thy will be done") can surely be distinguished from the random, blank pain of an atheist universe. The cosmos "groans", being presently subject to "decay/ futility/ meaninglessness" (Rom 8), but the Christian (certainly the Calvinist Christian) affirms in effect that "this (cosmic) sickness is not unto death but to the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified by it" (John 11). But pain remains pain. Jesus wept sorely at Lazarus' tomb minutes before he commanded Lazarus to walk out of there. The certainty that all was going to be well (or "OK" - 美好 měi hǎo) did not seem to exempt Jesus from the trauma of loss.

So it seems that all these words are being stretched beyond their limits in the attempt to contain a reality which transcends the lexicon. Like plastic supermarket bags faced with a snorting Clydesdale horse on the counter.

The default outlook of our Western society is secular. The defining context is Godless. The de facto committment is to a neo-Darwinist philosophical materialism. Design is illusion. Life accidental. Death terminal. Purpose strictly DIY. The random Now is all there is.

In contrast, the Christian is optimistic about the future, however desolate the present:

The Good Shepherd will lead us to a Good Place:

Context is everything:

Those latter words are central to the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd, and he beautifully and classically articulates this Biblical context of suffering:

2. Zen
You ask (smiling, I imagine) about an apparent "Zen" bias to my Calvinism. Ecclesiastes (and indeed the context of your very quote above) are a reasonable place to begin some kind of explanation -

Now, it seems to me that, the God-references apart, this passage from Ecclesiates is pretty "Zenish". Indeed, this could be argued for much of Ecclesiastes. There is here in Ecclesiastes the sense that our attitude to the moment-by-moment variegated vicissitudes of our lives should be characterized by equanimity (Latin aequus "even" + animus "mind"). Engagement with/focus on the everyday here and now is urged in Zen. Metaphysical speculation and 'overthinking' what might be or what might have been is discouraged in Zen. There is in Zen also an engaging simplicity (rusticity?) and matter-of-factness. Consider in this regard a few anecdotes from the book "Zen Flesh Zen Bones" (Compiled by Paul Reps) -

(Compare "Everything is best" with "Everything is beautiful in its time" - F.)

This of course brings to mind aspects of Christ's teaching -

And Paul's -

And Job's responses -

3. Detachment
Some of these Scriptural references are clearly urging on us a detachment from material comforts. A healthy detachment which frees from anxiety. Christians are fairly used to that message, however resistant we are to it in practice. But a closer reading of Paul reveals a profounder message which, like that of Job, cuts much nearer the bone. From the perspective of "spirituality", detachment from luxuries is surely kid's stuff. Detachment from personal deprivation, from personal desolation and disaster - that requires considerably more maturity. "Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?" Well, shall we? Shall we say that this "trouble" which befalls us, indeed this harrowing horror, is "beautiful in its time" ? Shall we say with Job "The Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord"? Are we even close to being able to say with Paul "For I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances"? OK, so now our mind goes to extreme life-shocks - the death of a child, etc. And such events of course are the bottom line for us in the sense that, if we can echo Job at that point then we have surely passed the "test"-

"For you, O God, tested us;
     you refined us like silver.
You brought us into prison
     and laid burdens on our backs.
You let men ride over our heads;
     we went through fire and water,
     but you brought us to a place of abundance."
(Psalm 66:10-12, NIV)

"Ô Dieu, tu nous as éprouvés,
tu nous as passés au creuset comme l'argent,
tu nous as mis en difficulté,
tu nous as accablés de détresse.
Tu as laissé des hommes
nous passer à cheval sur la tête,
nous avons dû traverser le feu et l'eau.
Mais tu nous as tirés de là et soulagés."
(Psaume 66:10-12, en français courant)

However, although we are told that "In all this, Job did not sin in what he said", it is important to observe - it is surely a deliverance to observe - that he was far from impassive. In fact many chapters of the Book of Job are sustained expressions of bitter complaint, crippling bewilderment, and abysmal despair. This man was no Stoic. Nor was Christ Himself. His mental agony in Gethsemane, His public grief at Lazarus's tomb, we have already alluded to. His anger and His humour are also apparent in the Gospels. The challenge faced by Job, and fulfilled by Christ, was to cleave unto God whatever the circumstances. Attachment to God enables commensurate detachment from circumstance. By "detachment from circumstance" we in no way intend a flight from reality, or refusal to face up to unwelcome facts. As you are well aware, there is a pietistic strand of evangelicalism which refrains from participation in society, culture, politics etc, in order, ostensibly, to preserve and cultivate internal sanctity. This, I truly believe, is heretical. It is like an army which digs itself into foxholes and refuses to engage the encroaching enemy, convinced that the only war is the one within their "souls". So, while Christian detachment is "unto God", it is yet in the midst of circumstance. In other words, we are talking about transcendence over circumstance rather than avoidance of circumstance. The Calvinist emphasis on the sovereignty of God is crucial here. If His sovereignty were less than absolute, the words "Thy will be done" would be about as meaningful as "Let's just keep our fingers crossed".

An all-swallowing swamp shrouded in noxious fog. That's what Job's stable, comfortable world had become. Almost overnight. His very body decaying like putrid timber. He clung, as if hung by a nail, to that single broken branch above him.

 So God’s rest is there for people to enter, but those who first heard this good news failed to enter because they disobeyed God. So God set another time for entering his rest, and that time is today. God announced this through David much later in the words already quoted:

   “Today when you hear his voice,
      don’t harden your hearts.”
(Hebrews 4:6-11, New Living Translation)

So whether we face flood or storm, we yet endeavour to find rest (ie God's rest) for the sole of our foot:

God is our refuge and strength,
      A very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear,
      Even though the earth be removed,
      And though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
Though its waters roar and be troubled,
      Though the mountains shake with its swelling.  Selah 
.....
 Be still, and know that I am God;
      I will be exalted among the nations,
      I will be exalted in the earth!
(Psalm 46:1-3,10 NKJV)

Isaiah tells us:

I observe that, for me as a teacher, a practiced attitude of calm (on those occasions when I get close to it!) saves me from an anger which can so often lead into speech and behaviour which I later regret. In other words, the conscious fostering of "serenity" (clichéd term though it now is) will impact on our self-control - which, let us remember, is a fruit of the Spirit (Galations 5:23). Christ tells us that "men will have to give account on the day of judgement for every careless word they have spoken" (Matt 12:36). Is self-control an instance of "psychological self-management"? The pietist should at least be settled by the thought that "self-control" is a sin-avoidance skill. A factor in one's attitude to alcohol is of course its possible impairment of self-control. Intake is avoided or regulated largely with self-control in mind. Is that "psychological self-management"?

And just by-the-by, it is interesting that the following verses mention the matter of speech and self-control  - "If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless" (James 1:26). He picks up this theme again in chapter 3 - "We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check. When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body... All kinds of animals...have been tamed by man, but no man can tame the tongue" (James 3:2-8). 

So then, a glance in the mirror maketh us pretty not! We must pick up the face-cloth and comb and attend to our appearance. We must act. On a daily, routine basis. Grime sullies our face. Stress sullies and disfigures our thoughts, our behaviour, our speech. Are there daily routines we can look to? Are there stress-reducing approaches which are at all explicit in the Bible? Psalm 1 gives us one answer. It is Zen-like in its call for daily meditation, but distinctly un-Zen in its emphasis on Book, Law and Word. The latter is at variance with Zen in emphasizing propositional verbal truth. For Zen (at least in its "universal one-ness" guise), words are obfuscation and distraction, and words pretending to metaphysical content are most suspect  -

Ray Grigg quotes the foregoing in his very interesting book "The Tao of Zen", but later adds -

"And it is human nature to use words. Denying them is like denying walking or eating or loving. The trick is to use words without creating a metaphysical construct that takes on a life of its own. Both the Taoist and Zen traditions have an oral and written literature. But the wisdom their sages offer rests on the understanding that the choice cannot be between words or silence; it can only be both words and silence. Indeed a silent wordlessness would become an absolute, merely another metaphysic." (p 197)

Words, of course, differentiate aspects of reality, specify that "this" is not "that", and that 'now" is not "then". The one-ness of Zen comes from transcending all differentiation, all specification, all paradox. Words distract from the physical "now", leading to abstract speculation which, for Zen, is inherently futile and delusive. Thus the question of a Zen initiate may well be answered not with words, but with a sharp slap or kick, to jolt him with a shock back into the realization/enlightenment that the physical here and now is all the Truth there is. Zen is praxis.

 The Christian relationship to words is fundamentally different, though there are surprising correspondences also. One correspondence is apparent in the letter of James already referred to above. James puts great weight on action rather than words as an index of an authentic grasp of the Truth. Then we think at once of passages such as "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 7:21).

Some sense of the degree to which the Buddhist may feel comfortable with James is evident in the following excerpt from a book review by Amos Yong (Regent University School of Divinity, Virginia, USA) in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34/2 (2007). The review is of "The Wisdom of James: Parallels with Mahāyāna Buddhism" by John P. Keenan -

This Mahāyāna reading of James unsurprisingly culminates at one place (among others) in the discourse on teaching and the untamed tongue in the middle of the epistle (3:1–12). From the Mahāyāna perspective, the problem of the tongue is neither merely its capacity for abuse nor only the possibility of false teachings, even if both are matters of concern. Rather, the problem more simply put is that verbal constructs emanate from the tongue. Insofar as discursive and prejudicial discrimination is dependent on words, to that same extent James’ concern can be understood with teaching itself as “an act of language-formed delusion” (p. 217n4). Keenan thus suggests the virtue of one of the main heroes in the epistle, Job, is the exemplary silence that characterizes his faith (pp. 159–63; cp. 5:11–12 and Job 42:1–6). This understanding of Job dovetails not only with the broader observation, perennially noted by James interpreters, that the letter is devoid of doctrinal claims, but also with the fact that “James never identifies any conceptual content for the wisdom God gives” (p. 40). All of this is in line with the Mahāyāna tendency to subordinate conventionally articulated doctrinal teaching, because of its emptiness, to practical wisdom. But the Mahāyāna teachers themselves recognized emptiness is neither an end in itself nor to be grasped as such, since this would be to reify an abstraction.
Hence recognition of the emptiness of conventional language leads the sage beyond speech to the embodiment of practical wisdom that is capable of transforming the world. Similarly, with James, “It is not that one should not think, but that one should not think within the framework of friendship with the world [cp. 2:23, 3:13–18, 4:4], within the measure of the world, where distinctions between rich and poor are very important, where the classes of society are almost metaphysical entities” (p. 138).
On Keenan’s reading, then, the letter of James emphasizes “an operative wisdom that discerns needs and responds compassionately” (p. 119). In this framework, the goal of teaching is not discriminatory knowledge (of the world’s) but rather an understanding that leads to merciful compassion. But could we not also see the Mahāyāna tradition in light of James such that, if James is divinely revelatory, then the letter itself judges human thoughts and actions? If God is the ultimate judge, as Keenan rightly refuses to interpret away, then the insistence that James writes in the wisdom tradition of Torah interpretation and practice suggests it should be read as a prophetic tract through which divine imperatives and judgment appear with illocutionary force. In this case, a more dialectical and dialogical relationship between the New Testament and Mahāyāna Buddhism would see mutual illumination and transformation: the text of James is opened up through the Mahāyāna hermeneutic on the one hand, even as Mahāyāna discourse is itself called to accountability before the ultimate law and judgment of God on the other.

(John P. Keenan, The Wisdom of James: Parallels with Mahāyāna Buddhism, New York and Mahwah, NJ: The Newman Press, 2005)

And a thoughtful Calvinist is unlikely to have too much problem with the following sentiments of Lu K’uan Yu (Charles Luk) (1898-1978) -

"As long as people are beguiled by words, they can never expect to penetrate to the heart of Zen. Why? Because words are merely a vehicle on which the truth is carried. Not understanding the meaning of the old masters and their koans, people try to find it in the words only, but they will find nothing there to lay their hands on. The truth itself is beyond all description, but it is by words that the truth is manifested. Let us, then, forget the words when we gain the truth itself. This is done only when we have an insight through experience into that which is indicated by the words."

For all the "truth-beyond-words" tenor of that last quote, it is significant that in the midst of it Lu K’uan Yu states that "words are merely a vehicle on which the truth is carried" and "it is by words that the truth is manifested". This is a necessary clarification by him, since any unqualified assertion that "the truth cannot be put into words" would be patently self-contradictory, and turn Lu K’uan Yu's very act of writing into a futile, even counter-productive, exercise. Of course, the anti-word koans are also comprised of words. So though Zen takes great pains to point beyond words, it is in practice not absolutist in this regard, recognizing the degree to which silence can be misconstrued even more than words.

I would say, nonetheless, that the Christian worldview, while also being wary of the deluding potential of words ("for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" 2 Cor 3:6), is far less equivocal about endorsing words as viable vehicles of truth. Darwinian dogma would have words appearing far down the line (or up the tree?) of human evolution. For Darwinism words are refined grunts, with no transcendent reference - no 'lexicon' or 'grammar' in the heavens to arbitrate meaning. But the Bible has God walking and conversing with Adam "in the cool of the day" and explaining to him the purpose of his life. Words are 'grounded' in God. Language is analogous of Him. Humans needed propositional verbal input from God (in whose image we are made) from the beginning. Adam may well have inscripturated the opening passages of Genesis, with copies of these "diaries" (and those of Noah etc) being redacted into our Book of Genesis by Moses. To speak and write was human from the outset. We do not have grunting ape-like or animal forebears.

The Logos created the cosmos and sustains it by His "word of power" (Heb 1:3). And here we have another unlikely correspondence. Zen of course warns against peering at the finger instead of noticing the moon to which the finger points. Christians would concur in that sense, but also recognize that words point to the Word. The Moon, indeed, points to the Word (the Logos) - to Him Who commanded "Let there be light!". Compare this with Psalm 89:36,37 - "His throne is as secure as the sun, as eternal as the moon, my faithful witness in the sky!". One French translation renders this charmingly - "Tant que la lune sera là, fidèle témoin, derrière les nuages" (en français courant).

Grass and trees have the buddha nature.
They are not different from me.
If I could just be like the grass and the trees,
I'd find the Way in no time.
Men nowadays won't go the Way:
point it out, and they curse it.
A wounded sigh for these folks:
paupers gone begging on a mountain of gold.

"Hymn on the Way" by Zen master Guan Xiu (Kuan Hsiu), 832 - 912.
Translated by J.P. Seaton. The Literary Review

Interestingly, Christ's advice for escaping the stress of worry is to ponder nature - "Consider the ravens", "Consider how the lilies grow". Here again, though, we tend to skim these verses rather than plumb them. We perhaps treat the mention of "ravens" and "lilies" as no more than a couple of random nods in the direction of nature. As a memorandum that some time in the garden, or the odd "constitutional" walk in the park or country, can help soothe the troubled brow. We can surely venture deeper than this, though. Consider the ravens. They don't worry about tomorrow. Indeed, even less (one assumes) do they regret yesterday. Like all animals, they live in the "here and now". The lily is even less speculative. It waves its leaves about rather more slowly than the raven flaps its wings. I don't imagine for a moment that Christ was suggesting that we should not prepare for the future nor seek to mend the past. Or that we should habitually move like sloths. But I do imagine that when He gives advice, that advice is worth the deepest scrutiny. Is Christ signalling "gear-changes" in thought here which are available to humans, and that we could beneficially practice? (cf "A time to cast away stones, And a time to gather stones... A time to keep silence, And a time to speak... A time of war, And a time of peace" ). Different gears suit different driving conditions. Sometimes neutral is the appropriate position for the gear-stick. Revving in frustration at yet another red light may not be kind on the engine. Here is Christ's advice for coping with everyday stress - consider the (gear of?) ravens (cf Dooyeweerd's "sensitive"sphere (F/B), the realm of feeling/sentience/emotion, mentioned below). Consider the (gear of?) lilies (cf "biotic" sphere (F/B). This is not really so off the wall as it sounds at first. To sit and pat a pet dog, or stroke a cat, or talk to a budgie, involves rapport with the animal. Identification with the thought processes of the animal. Being on the animal's "wavelength". This practice is known to be de-stressing for the human. Tending house-plants likewise involves a therapeutic affinity with the plant. A focused attentiveness to the state of the plant. Zen of course also frequently alludes to rock and water (cf Dooyeweerd's "physical" sphere). Which of us has not done the equivalent of picking up a pebble from the beach or the river, and watching it change colour as it dried? This kind of practice goes on daily with no hangups over mystical baggage. People instinctively realize the benefits. It is just a short step to suggesting that perhaps to deliberately sit and gaze, mind in neutral (or "at ease", to use a military metaphor), at a house-plant (or office-plant) for a minute or two daily might help balance and condition our mental state. If we are stuck in the car at traffic lights when we are in a desperate hurry, can we learn to gaze for the duration at, for instance, that tree over there or that seagull wheeling overhead, slipping our mind (as well as the car) into calm neutral instead of "seeing red"?

We are supposed to be taking "every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Cor 10:5) We are told that "Thou dost keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee" Isaiah 26:3 (The Amplified Version renders this: "You will guard him and keep him in perfect and constant peace whose mind [both its inclination and its character] is stayed on You, because he commits himself to You, leans on You, and hopes confidently in You"). Here are a couple more verses in this vein -

"I saw the Lord always before me. He is at my right hand, that I should not be moved." (Psalm 16:8)

"This is the day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it." (Psalm 118:24)

This is the hour that the Lord hath made. This is the minute that the Lord hath made...This is the red light that the Lord hath made!

Inner equilibrium. Founded on the sovereign Lord, the Living God.

"I came to realize that mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars."

Each plant, creature, rock, somehow informs (in-forms) and expresses (ex-presses) our thought. It is more than symbol and representation. It is far more literal (concretely actual) than that. To be human is to live and articulate, physically and thought-fully, in this medium. And the Christian has glimpsed that this "medium", (like that "Rock") is, in some real sense, "Christ". All bushes burn with Him and all ground is holy with Him. I am not at all talking the evolutionist pantheist language of a Teilhard de Chardin here. Nor suggesting any kind of pantheism. The Creation is not Christ in a pantheist sense. I am merely reiterating what Paul says in Romans 11:36, that "From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen". That Christ is the meaning of all things. That He is the meaning of the heavens and the earth and all that in them is. That nothing exists which is not ultimately about Him. That the earth is "full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea"(Isaiah 11:9). When you think about it, that Rock which accompanied Israel through the wilderness (1 Cor 10:4) was the True Promised Land, rather than Canaan. Christ is our Homeland too. Christ is our Universe. We are made in His image. In the new heavens and the new earth all that "is" shall explicitly refer to Him and extol Him (indeed it does so explicitly now also, but men "suppress the truth in unrighteousness" Romans 1:18). Let us consider (if we can get past the old-fashioned translation) the following pertininent - indeed remarkable - words of Calvin (a man unlikely to be accused of pantheism!):

Since the infinite wisdom of God is displayed in the admirable structure of heaven and earth, it is absolutely impossible to unfold The History of the Creation of the World in terms equal to its dignity. For while the measure of our capacity is too contracted to comprehend things of such magnitude, our tongue is equally incapable of giving a full and substantial account of them. As he, however, deserves praise, who, with modesty and reverence, applies himself to the consideration of the works of God, although he attain less than might be wished, so, if in this kind of employment, I endeavour to assist others according to the ability given to me, I trust that my service will be not less approved by pious men than accepted by God. I have chosen to premise this, for the sake not only of excusing myself, but of admonishing my readers, that if they sincerely wish to profit with me in meditating on the works of God, they must bring with them a sober, docile, mild, and humble spirit. We see, indeed, the world with our eyes, we tread the earth with our feet, we touch innumerable kinds of God's works with our hands, we inhale a sweet and pleasant fragrance from herbs and flowers, we enjoy boundless benefits; but in those very things of which we attain some knowledge, there dwells such an immensity of divine power, goodness, and wisdom, as absorbs all our senses. Therefore, let men be satisfied if they obtain only a moderate taste of them, suited to their capacity. And it becomes us so to press towards this mark during our whole life, that (even in extreme old age) we shall not repent of the progress we have made, if only we have advanced ever so little in our course...

I now return to the design of Moses, or rather of the Holy Spirit, who has spoken by his mouth. We know God, who is himself invisible, only through his works. Therefore, the Apostle elegantly styles the worlds, "ta me ek fainomenoon blepomena", as if one should say, "the manifestation of things not apparent," (Heb. 11: 3). This is the reason why the Lord, that he may invite us to the knowledge of himself, places the fabric of heaven and earth before our eyes, rendering himself, in a certain manner, manifest in them. For his eternal power and Godhead (as Paul says) are there exhibited, (Rom. 1: 20). And that declaration of David is most true, that the heavens, though without a tongue, are yet eloquent heralds of the glory of God, and that this most beautiful order of nature silently proclaims his admirable wisdom, (Ps. 19: 1). This is the more diligently to be observed, because so few pursue the right method of knowing God, while the greater part adhere to the creatures without any consideration of the Creator himself. For men are commonly subject to these two extremes; namely, that some, forgetful of God, apply the whole force of their mind to the consideration of nature; and others, overlooking the works of God, aspire with a foolish and insane curiosity to inquire into his Essence. Both labour in vain. To be so occupied in the investigation of the secrets of nature, as never to turn the eyes to its Author, is a most perverted study; and to enjoy everything in nature without acknowledging the Author of the benefit, is the basest ingratitude. Therefore, they who assume to be philosophers without Religion, and who, by speculating, so act as to remove God and all sense of piety far from them, will one day feel the force of the expression of Paul, related by Luke, that God has never left himself without witness, (Acts 14: 17). For they shall not be permitted to escape with impunity because they have been deaf and insensible to testimonies so illustrious. And, in truth, it is the part of culpable ignorance, never to see God, who everywhere gives signs of his presence. But if mockers now escape by their cavils, hereafter their terrible destruction will bear witness that they were ignorant of God, only because they were willingly and maliciously blinded. As for those who proudly soar above the world to seek God in his unveiled essence, it is impossible but that at length they should entangle themselves in a multitude of absurd figments. For God--by other means invisible--(as we have already said) clothes himself, so to speak, with the image of the world in which he would present himself to our contemplation. They who will not deign to behold him thus magnificently arrayed in the incomparable vesture of the heavens and the earth, afterwards suffer the just punishment of their proud contempt in their own ravings. Therefore, as soon as the name of God sounds in our ears, or the thought of him occurs to our minds, let us also clothe him with this most beautiful ornament; finally, let the world become our school if we desire rightly to know God.

(Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, Argument)
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/ipb-e/epl-01/cvgn1-02.txt

How I long to see
among dawn flowers
the face of God.
(Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694)

There is a ready acceptance of given concrete situations in Zen which seems not to fall victim (contrary to expectation) to a despondent fatalism. It is more robust and more positive in tone than that. Curiously, as we have noticed, one almost catches a whiff reminiscent of the aroma-therapeutic Calvinist flower of the absolute sovereignty of God, a blossom which quietly adorns the hospital bedside of our smitten universe. A blossom which intimates the imminent all-healing of both cosmic and personal pain: "And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations" (Rev 22:2). A Calvinist flower whose petals gentle the mind with the (however unlikely) rightness of Now: "everything beautiful in its time","A time to live and a time to die". This biblical "content-in-all-circumstances" trait is, as we have seen above, echoed in Zen. Is this a kind of "Common Grace" wisdom?

Lest the foregoing be still misunderstood as fatalistic and as offensively oblivious of life's horrors, we should stress anew two points of clarification. Firstly, commitment to the sovereignty of God is not in the least incompatible with the most intense of struggles to overturn adverse circumstances. Secondly, it is of course to be understood rather as a personal credo of fortitude than as promiscuously proferred counsel. When Job's friends sat silently and wept with him in compassionate solidarity they were indeed his "comforters". When they began to theorize over the supposed metaphysics of his plight, they became obnoxious. They grievously added to Job's woes by, as it were, sacrificing him on the altar of abstraction. And should anyone complain that there is a paradox between submission to the sovereign will of God and any endeavour to better current circumstance, I would point out that this so-called "paradox" is apparent even in the prayer Christ taught His disciples. On the one hand there is the confession: "Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory". On the other hand, there is the supplication: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven".

So we can thus perhaps begin to appreciate that simply mouthing the words "sovereignty of God" does not magically grant serene composure to the Calvinist facing a meltdown level of stress. Far from it. While certainly for the Calvinist the sovereignty of God remains the only possible deliverance from blank loss, that very sovereignty can also provoke crushing perpexities. In his commentary on the Book of Job, Francis I. Andersen has the following to say:

The intense faith of Job immediately sees the hand of God in every 'natural' event. There are no 'accidents' in a universe ruled by the one sovereign Lord. Hence Job's problem. Such mishaps are not a problem for the polytheist, the dualist, the atheist, the naturalist, the fatalist, the materialist, the agnostic. An annoyance, a tragedy even, but not a problem. Suffering caused by human wickedness or by the forces of nature is ultimately a problem only for a believer in the one Creator who is both good and almighty; so this problem can arise only within the Bible with its distinctive moral monotheism...

Job sees only the hand of God in these events. It never occurs to him to curse the desert brigands, to curse the frontier guards, to curse his own stupid servants, now lying dead for their watchlessness. All secondary causes vanish. It was the Lord who gave; it was the Lord who removed; and in the Lord alone must the explanation for these strange happenings be sought...

Job's faith does not relieve his agony; it causes it.

Francis I Andersen, Job: Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries, IVP, pp 86, 88, 89

And here is a pertinent Zen consideration of such matters (quoted by Rev. Ralph Allan Smith in his online article "Zen: A Trinitarian Critique":

Now we shall consider the case of a hungry lion. He is a ferocious wild animal. He has no scruples against attacking a pack of deer peacefully grazing in the field. He will choose a ground of vantage and suddenly rushing into the group pounce upon one which happens to be not quick enough to avoid the enemy. . . . In this he has no vain desire to prove his prowess against the weaker. His biological urge makes him act in the way he naturally displays. He has neither pride nor remorse nor the feeling of anything that he ought not to have done. He is perfectly innocent of all these human feelings. He has absolutely no repentance, as he has no sense of duty and responsibility. He has simply executed what his nature demands. . . . As long as the world is so constituted and one life subsists on another, it is like a gale passing over a garden, everything in its passage has to give itself to the raging force of Nature. There is here no killer, no killing, and no killed. The lion is just as innocent as the atmospheric commotion. If there is anyone who is responsible for all this carnage, the Creator is the one and nobody else.

[Daisetz T. Suzuki, "Zen and Parapsychology" in Philosophy and Culture -- East and West: East-West Philosophy in Practical Perspective, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), pp. 740-41]

As we meet the first-person narrator at the start of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, we quickly discover that he has recovered (or has he?) from a major mental breakdown (perhaps insanity). The central philosophical strand of the book is a gradual unfolding, epiphany even, of what the narrator can piece together of his former self's insight into "Quality". "Quality" (as presented in the book) transcends "subjective" and "objective". It transcends also the western world's intractable struggle between "romantic" and "classical" mindsets.

Despite its title, the book carries a disclaimer which says (in part) that "it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice".  However, Zen does come in for mention, and moreover it is clear that Pirsig sees major affinities, if not complete consonance, between "Quality" and the "Tao". Pirsig's pre-breakdown self (who he calls Phaedrus) is reading Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching:

"He had broken the code. He read on. Line after line. Page after page. Not a discrepancy. What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything."

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, Vintage, 1999, p 254)

A key part of the complex storyline of this exceptional book centres on Pirsig's estranged yet poignant relationship with Chris, his teenage son, who rides pillion during Pirsig's trans-American motorcycle journey. The book was first published in 1974. In an afterword (written around 1984?), Pirsig shares the shocking news that in 1979 his son, then aged 23, was brutally stabbed to death in San Francisco as he left the Zen Center where he (Chris) was a student. Pirsig's first comment surely touches the common humanity of all who have shared, or come near to sharing, such grief:

"I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else." (Ibid p 415)

He then describes his need to find some shape for it all:

I tend to become taken with philosophic questions, going over them and over them and over them again in loops that go round and round and round until they either produce an answer or become so repetitively locked on they become psychiatrically dangerous, and now the question became obsessive: "Where did he go?" (Ibid p 416)

Such resolution as Pirsig arrives at, or at least shares, begins with talk of "pattern", which sounds vaguely scientific, but in this context (to me at least) disagreeably impersonal. The language register then transposes to bring to mind reincarnation (though the term as such is not used). So Pirsig at this point anyway, would seem to be finding his deepest solace in a Buddhist framework, though his overall terminology is somewhat prevaricating, as if he is allowing different ways of conceptualizing (or maybe he is simply and honestly unresolved):

"What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.

Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn't find anything.....If you take that part of the pattern that is not the flesh and bones of Chris and call it the "spirit" of Chris or the "ghost" of Chris, then you can say without further translation that the spirit or ghost of Chris is looking for a new body to enter....In any event it was not many months later that my wife conceived, unexpectedly.... So I guess you could say, in this primitive way of looking at things, that Chris got his airplane ticket after all. This time he's a little girl named Nell and our life is back in perspective again. The hole in the pattern is being mended.
(Ibid, p 417)

Despite the huge common ground emotionally and existentially in such matters, the Calvinist would not of course countenance any talk of reincarnation. Rebirth, yes. As Christ explains to Nicodemus:

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him."
 In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."
 "How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"
 Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."
 "How can this be?" Nicodemus asked.
 "You are Israel's teacher," said Jesus, "and do you not understand these things? I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son" (John 3:1-18 NIV)

(Herman Dooyeweerd, "A New Critique of Theoretical Thought" Vol II, p 34)

The wind blows wherever it pleases:

Zen master Baoche of Mt. Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, "Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. When, then, do you fan yourself?"
"Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent," Baoche replied, "you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere."
"What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?" asked the monk again. The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply.

(Written by Dōgen in 1233. Translated by Robert Aitken and Kazuaki Tanahashi)
http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/GenjoKoan_Aitken.htm

Is there thus a constructive Zen and a destructive, subjectivist, Hyper-Zen, much as there is a constructive Calvinism and a destructive, subjectivist, Hyper-Calvinism? Within the Hyper-Zen worldview survival depends on the acceptence of the (paradoxically) illusory nature of the "concrete". One wonders again if this is a Buddhist hijacking of the Zen boat (see below [as it were!]). Compare in that regard these further snippets from "Zen Flesh Zen Bones" -

In his book "The Tao of Zen", already quoted from above, Ray Grigg is at pains to disengage historical "Zen" from what he sees as the encumbering and compromising theology of the Buddhism which subsumed and engulfed it:

In the same context, Grigg quotes Alan Watts (from "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen", 1959) -  

However justified is Grigg's clearly partisan disentangling of Zen from Buddhism, there is in his statement - "Buddhism rejects the world... Zen accepts the world"- an intriguing echo of the ancient Greek "form versus matter" dichotomy which has dominated Western thought for millenia. It is patent from Dooyeweerd's and Van Til's thought that when any human system makes an absolute of that which is relative (and only the true God is NOT relative), the counter-absolute sooner or later manifests itself.

The form/matter split can be clearly detected in Western thinking down to our own day. It appears, for example, in humanism as a polarization between "nature" and "freedom", or between "science" and "personality". Via his synthesis of Aristotelean thought and biblical doctrine, Thomas Aquinas ensured that the "form/matter" divide prevailed also in much Christian thought, under the guise of "nature" versus "grace". This latter dichotomy is evident in the mindset of those many Christians for whom the gospel is really of relevance only in the realm of the "soul", the "spiritual", the "afterlife" etc. In contrast, cultural, political, technological, etc, issues of our everyday physical world are regarded by these same Christians as autonomous or even antipathetic as far as the gospel is concerned. Calvin's opus provided a biblical detox, or recalibration, of Christianity. In practice, however, many who deem themselves to be Calvinists still lug with them the encumbering baggage of Aquinas (and hence of Ancient Greece). So if Buddhism "rejects the world", the same can alas be said of certain strands of "Calvinism".

As Van Til points out, humanism switches at the drop of a hat between its notion of a cosmos which is exhaustively law-based, thus rationally "lit-up" and all-knowable, (indeed "all-known" to the extent that God can be confidently asserted as non-existent) and its notion of an irrationalist cosmos which is born of mystery and blind accident and is ultimately un-knowable (and so the idea of an absolute, predestining God is untenable). The former is identified by Van Til as humanism's "principle of continuity", and the latter as its "principle of discontinuity". Humanism cannot reconcile the two. Van Til further explains that the Christian's "principle of continuity" is the infinitely exhaustive knowledge that God has of Himself and of His creation. Likewise, the Christian's "principle of discontinuity" is the inescapably finite nature of our own knowledge - which can never be, even in eternity, exhaustive. The Christian's knowledge can nontheless be true and dependable as far as it goes. Marine mountain tops - truth revealed - may jut above sea-level as islands to provide solid anchorage and footing, while the fundamental connexion between the mountains - truth unrevealed - remains unseen and unmapped. The two Christian "principles" are patently compatible.

So what of Buddhism and Zen? The "principle of continuity" here would appear to lie in the absolute (metaphysical) dissolution of all differentiation. The "principle of discontinuity" in the absolute (anti-metaphysical) concreteness of each particular. Paradox is rather more apparent than compatibility. Yet Ray Grigg, for example, would persuade us that both "plates", as it were, can be kept (or indeed cannot be stopped from?) spinning. In stereoscopic, binary oneness. In gyroscopic, dynamic stillness. Grigg informs us (bear in mind that he wishes to emancipate Zen from Buddhism) -

Thus, in Zen terms, the solution lies not in any 'rationalist' reconciliation at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. From the Zen perspective, paradox must be recognized as endemic to existence. Both sides are simultaneously true and false. We do not choose between them. We rather detach from both sides and transcend the paradox by accepting the paradox. Or is that to deny the paradox?  Words cannot deal with these matters -

In a short article critiquing postmodernism in the light of Van Til, Jacob Gabriel Hale says:

Though much of postmodernism postdates the bulk of Van Til’s intellectual enterprise, much of Van Til’s thought is directly applicable to some concerns that postmodernism has raised. Much like Derrida, Van Til was quick to point out the inherent contradiction of modern thought. According to Van Til, any attempt to ground knowledge in abstract, impersonal principles such as reason, sense data, logic, a logos, a “one”, or any other unifying metaphysical principle, would inevitably collapse or “deconstruct” under the weight of its own contradictions. The clearest example of this critique is not only found in Van Til’s analysis of western philosophers from Plato through the modern period, but in the traditional problem of the one and many. According to Van Til, the history of western thought can be summarized as an attempt to give a holistic explanation of “things” in relation to the particulars of reality and their universal characteristics. This is certainly true of Plato and Aristotle, but Van Til maintains that this theme runs through the whole of western philosophy. From nominalism, to Cartesian dualism, from Spinoza’s panentheism, to Kant’s transcendental idealism, from Nietzsche’s will-to-power, to Husserl’s presence, every attempt to assert a philosophy of “things” is an attempt to explain both the universality and particularity of our world and how it relates to the content of our consciousness. In other words, it is an attempt to ground absolute knowledge of the world in finite impersonal “things”. For Van Til, these attempts are inherently flawed because they attempt to reason autonomously, not only independent of bias, which is itself impossible, but also independent of God. For this reason, philosophies that attempt to uncover a logos, a being, an organizing metaphysical principle that in turn grounds knowledge and provides an absolute foundation for knowledge is doomed from the outset. Through his analysis of western thought, Van Til shows how philosophy after philosophy deconstructs itself into irrationalism. ("Derrida, Van Til and the Metaphysics of Postmodernism: An Essay" by Jacob Gabriel Hale)

We note again that though Van Til champions human rationality, he remains an implacable opponent of rationalism. Van Til recognized and rejected rationalism as an impossible totalitarian project born of humanist hubris which presupposes the possession of exhaustive universal knowledge. For Van Til such is not and never shall be the preserve of creatures, who must therefore pursue rationality with all vigour yet in the humble awareness that mysterious chasms will be a perennial feature of one's journey. The crucial point here is that Van Til founds his inner equilibrium not on a (purportedly) seamlessly-woven rationalistic web of abstract knowledge (theology included) but on the "ontological Trinity". Not, that is, on theoretical abstraction, but on actuality, indeed on the Living God Who created and sustains actuality and Who floods it with all meaning. 

As mentioned above (section 7), in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" Robert M. Pirsig clearly perceives reality's refusal to be reduced to a mere segment of itself. Pirsig's influential book is essentially a valiant quest to heal the rift between classical rationalism and romantic irrationalism by an appeal to a higher reality ("Quality") which informs, and therefore unifies, both. What is engagingly "Zen" about his whole presentation is that he continually grounds his metaphysics with references to the mechanics of his motorcycle, on which he is touring part of America:

"Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts into a practical, down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical or down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along - the repair of an old motorcycle."
(Robert M. Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values", Vintage 1999, p 276)

In rereading Pirsig, I am struck with how reminiscent of Dooyeweerd's thought much of it is. Apart from the matter of "irreducibility" just alluded to, Pirsig also echos Dooyeweerd's emphasis on the crucial importance of what the latter calls "pre-theoretical" or "naive" engagement with reality. Pirsig uses the terms "nonintellectual" and "preintellectual":

"...at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he (ie "Phaedrus", the narrator's alter ego) called Quality...

"The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects" (Ibid p 247)

Interestingly, in his "New Critique of Theoretical Thought", Herman Dooyeweerd welcomes this selfsame insight of Poincaré:

Intuition cannot be isolated from analysis. Conversely, analysis can never function without intuitive insight. This has been convincingly proved by Henri Poincaré, in his La Valeur de la Science, and in his Science et Hypothèse, to refute the idea of a "pure analysis" in the mathematical sciences. ("New Critique of Theoretical Thought", II 483)

So we are now glimpsing a fascinating confluence of ideas, centering on the role of "intuition", which Dooyeweerd sees as the "bottom layer" of logic. We will return to this key consideration later in Section 14 "Between Two Insanities".

As to the ethical modality, it is not at all clear to me yet on what Zen bases its ethics - its moral imperatives. No doubt wider reading on my part is required, but my misgivings are not allayed by what Alan Watts, for example, has to say in his book "The Spirit of Zen" -

"After all this the Western student will naturally be wondering where ordinary morality comes into Zen. Every religion has had its moral code, and the Buddha summed up his teaching in the words:

Cease to do evil;
Learn to do well;
Cleanse your own heart -
This is the way of the Buddhas.

It will be asked if there is not a grave danger in the Zen practice of accepting all things, both good and evil, as manifestations of the Buddha-nature, for on such grounds it might be possible to justify any form of action. Indeed this is a difficulty with which the Zen masters have had to reckon; immature disciples would frequently make the all-inclusiveness of Zen an excuse for pure libertinism, and it is for this reason that the members of Zen communities observe a rigid discipline. The solution to the difficulty is that no-one should undertake the practice of Zen without first having adapted himself to a thorough moral discipline."

(Alan W. Watts, The Spirit of Zen, Mandala, 1958, p 56)

The pistic (F/B) modality is the sphere of faith. It is here that humans have their convictions of certainty. All preceding modalities ought to be directed in worshipful obedience to the Creator via this sphere. The 'unbeliever' has as much faith as anyone else, except that his or her faith is misdirected and is invested in an absolutized modality (ie in an idol), rather in the transcendent Creator. Somehow, again I am not sure why, this apostate turning from the Creator leads the Zenist to believe in "Nothingness". Perhaps "nothingness" is what the "self" experiences when it attempts radically and fundamentally to replace the Creator as the focus of existence. Here again there is an echo of Dooyeweerd. Without pausing at the moment to try to unpack all that to which he is alluding (a daunting task!), we can at least sense the relevance when he writes:

 Sartre peered into a similar abyss - "le néant". Of course we must remember that the mindset of Zen would understand this "nothingness" as being simultaneously (and paradoxically) "everything"! "Nothingness" in the Zen mind is radically different from what the term denotes in a scientistic materialist mind. Take, for example, the following sentences from the internal martial arts' genius Peter Ralston's insightful (and demanding) book "Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power"(North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, 1999), and bear in mind that the burden of the book is to cultivate a moment-by-moment awareness of the physical here and now -

So the paradox is that the wayfarer in "Zenland" notices that the native inhabitants focus (in an intuitive, aesthetic manner) on concrete particulars - and on nothingness. Is it that in tending to make an absolute of the particular, the counter-absolute of Universal Oneness suddenly demands attention (and vice-versa)? The oak-panel in the cosmic wall alarmingly swivels in a Zen-blink to replace the Buddha idol (absolute universal undifferentiation) with the anti-Buddha idol (absolute brute particularism)...

As noted above, Cornelius Van Til points out that resolution of this philosophical "One v Many" enigma is only possible in the Person of the Triune God, in Whom singularity and plurality are equally ultimate and equally personal. To quote again from his book "Common Grace and the Gospel" (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, Phillipsburg, New Jersey, 1972) -

    "The ontological Trinity will be our interpretative concept everywhere. God is our concrete universal; in Him thought and being are coterminous, In Him the problem of knowledge is solved.
    If we begin thus with the ontological Trinity as our concrete universal, we frankly differ from every school of philosophy and from every school of science not merely in our conclusions, but in our starting-point and in our method as well. For us the facts are what they are, and the universals are what they are, because of their common dependence on the ontological Trinity. Thus, as earlier discussed, the facts are correlative to the universals. Because of this correlativity, there is genuine progress in history; because of it the Moment has significance." (p 64)

"The Moment has significance". How Zen is that!

10. Back to Nature
The Zen engagement with nature is very beguiling, particularly as you know, for artists. It is curious that, for all the rich allusion to nature in Scripture, the evangelical tradition does not really mediate nature to us very much, in word or paint. One exception which comes to mind is the old hymn "The earth with its store of wonders untold, Almighty thy power hath founded of old...Thy bountiful care, what tongue can recite? it breathes in the air, it shines in the light...it streams from the hills, it descends to the plain, and sweetly distills in the dew and the rain." That hymn is almost phenomenally good! Then one thinks of the more recent "The sky above is deeper blue, the earth beneath is richer green, something lives in every hue Christless eyes have never seen." While OK as far as it goes, this is sliding into subjectivity and sentimentality in comparison with the Reformed affirmation of objectivity in the earlier quote. Christ says "Consider the ravens. Consider the lilies." He says this in the same breath as he tells us to forget (in some sense) about tomorrow. In effect he is offering us a mental therapy. An emotional balm. - Focus on Nature. - Focus on Now.

Was it Common Grace which taught that insight to Li Bai ? -

The birds have vanished into the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

Or another rendering -

 Alone Looking at the Mountain   
 All the birds have flown up and gone;
 A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
 We never tire of looking at each other -
 Only the mountain and I.

  By Li Bai (Li Po, 701-762)

Or what of Wang Wei ? -

The pure descriptiveness of such poetry, with its lightness of touch and minimal metaphor can be readily accessed and appreciated by any of us. Neither erudite vocabulary nor recondite allusion fend us off. There is a simplicity of language and subject which recalls the gospel parables - though by definition, the parables work as extended metaphors or allegories. This is not at all to suggest that metaphor is an essential component of poetry, any more than it is of a painting. There is a similar life-oxygenating pleasure to such poetry as that given by beholding an exeptional natural view. One stops for a few moments on one's journey to survey such beauty, instinctively sensing the healingness of it. Paul of course tells us that "The invisible attributes of God, namely his eternal power and deity, have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made, so that they (who reject God) are without excuse" (Romans 1).

Nature is therapeutic (by and large, though in this fallen cosmos, nature can also be, of course, gruesome). It is therapeutic surely because, since we are made in the image of God, and since the attributes of God are clearly perceived in nature, nature reflects and confirms our identity. It is a mirror of healing. We discover ourselves there. Hence the hillwalking and the re-creational desire for the calming, entrancing landscape and seascape.

Pinyin: ye1su1 shuo1, wo3 jiu4 shi4 dao4lu4
Chinese: 耶 穌 說 我 就 是 道 路
(Alternatively view: Trad Simp.)

The burden of the Calvinist sphere-sovereignty analysis of reality is that each sphere (or modality or aspect) is irreducible to any of the others. Each is 'sovereign' in that specific sense, but not in an ultimate sense. Ultimately each modality derives its meaning from Christ the Root. Pure, absolute sovereignty belongs to Christ (Matt 28:18), and each of Dooyeweerd's fifteen modalities are fulfilled in Him. He is the integration point of all things. "All things are held together by His word of power" (Heb 1:3). "For from Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things" (Rom 11:36).

Solomon (author of Ecclesiastes?) exhibited his wisdom by referring to Nature (again, note the fact that Zen wisdom almost always refers to nature). Solomon's "consideration" of ravens, lilies etc was obviously "considerable" -

It is of major significance, I believe, that when God finally speaks to Job, the only answer He gives to Job's metaphysical quandary/quagmire occasioned by the mystery of suffering is to ask Job (at some length!) if perchance he has noticed Nature -

There is a curious resonance between that last verse and something Christ mentions in reference to His return in power as Creation's King - Matt 24:28 and Luke 17:37 - by which martial action (as opposed to verbal explanation) the perplexed grief of Job and of all of us will have its actual (rather than conceptual) answer. Meanwhile Job's response to all this in-your-face focus on nature is, interestingly, silence. "Interestingly" because word-inadequate silence precipitated by the observation of nature are keynotes of Zen. Though, despite having eyes to see, Zen does not see the Hand Job sees. And despite having ears to hear, Zen does not hear the Voice Job hears -

The multiple calamities which befell Job were ushered in by a whirlwind which devastated the house belonging to one of his sons while the siblings were present for a birthday celebration. So, Job's woes began with a whirlwind, and, poignantly, pivotally, it is out of a whirlwind that God now answers him. There is surely a profundity in this fact alone. There it is staring Job in the face - the implication that the first whirlwind was most certainly as much under God's control as this latter whirlwind. Though God's verbal reponse to Job lasts the whole of Chapters 38 and 39, all but 5 verses of Chapter 40, and then again all of Chapter 41, Job actually in one sense is told no more than that which was wordlessly self-evident to him by what he was now holistically experiencing - God was speaking to him out of what must have become in Job's mind the archetypal symbol of his destruction. God was demonstrating sovereignty over the forces of mayhem. In His long monologue to Job, God simply and relentlessly points to example after example of His sovereignty over Nature. Though in a curious sense Job is left none the wiser about the "whys" of his sufferings and his losses, we must take it that God was saying to Job that, for the moment, here was all the "theology"(or "ontology") he needed. We might tentatively venture to observe that God's answer to Job is "zenlike" insofar as it eschews metaphysical "explanation" but rather points to concrete Nature. And Job (as the enlightened disciple) realizes that the Truth is beyond verbal articulation.  For Job, of course, Nature is suffused with the awesome sovereignty of the Creator. He has just been reminded of this. And though the mystery of the suffering remains, Job has, in one sense, all the answer he needs. For Zen on the other hand, Nature is suffused with an awesome emptiness:

Trailing on the wind,
The smoke from Mount Fuji
Melts into the sky.
So too my thoughts -
Unknown their resting place.

(By Saigyo, 1118-90)
(Translated by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite)
(Zen Poems, Ed. Peter Harris, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 1999)

"In its precision and suggestiveness, this art has been compared with the art of the Japanese haiku, and the comparison is a good one. Basho's frog plopping into its pool in seventeenth century Japan makes no more durable or exact music than Belfast's blackbird clearing its throat over the lough almost a thousand years earlier. Equally memorable, compact and concrete are the lines beginning 'Scél lem duíb', lines that have all the brightness and hardness of a raindrop winking on a thorn. The poem shows us how accurately Flann O' Brien characterized early Irish verse-craft when he spoke of its 'steel-pen exactness'"

(Seamus Heaney, "The God in the Tree", from "The Pleasures of Gaelic Poetry", Edited by Seán Mac Réamoinn, Allen Lane Penguin books 1982)

There are many translations of Basho's famous frog poem. Allen Ginsberg gives us:

The old pond
A frog jumped in,
Kerplunk!

While James Kirkup cuts to the chase:

pond
     frog
          plop!

In his commentary on Basho's original haiku, Robert Aitken says -

With the frog as our clue, we guess that it is twilight in late spring. This setting of time and place needs to be established, but there is more. “Old” is a cue word of another sort. For a poet such as Bashô, an evening beside a mossy pond evoked the ancient. Bashô presents his own mind as this timeless, endless pond, serene and potent — a condition familiar to mature Zen students.

In one of his first talks in Hawai’i, Yamada Kôun Rôshi said: “When your consciousness has become ripe in true zazen — pure like clear water, like a serene mountain lake, not moved by any wind — then anything may serve as a medium for realization.”...

Tradition tells us that the Buddha was preoccupied with questions about suffering. The story of Zen is the story of men and women who were open to agonizing doubts about ultimate purpose and meaning. The entire teaching of Zen is framed by questions.

Profound inquiry placed the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, and his exacting focus brought him to the serene inner setting where the simple incident of noticing the morning star could suddenly disclose the ultimate Way. As Yamada Rôshi has said, any stimulus would do — a sudden breeze with the dawn, the first twittering of birds, the appearance of the sun itself. It just happened to be a star in the Buddha’s case. ...

Samadhi means “absorption,” but fundamentally it is unity with the whole universe. When you devote yourself to what you are doing, moment by moment — to your kôan when on your cushion in zazen, to your work, study, conversation, or whatever in daily life — that is samadhi. Do not suppose that samadhi is exclusively Zen Buddhist. Everything and everybody are in samadhi, even bugs, even people in mental hospitals.

(Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave: Basho's Haiku and Zen, Shoemaker and Hoard, Washington DC)

So here are the two early Gaelic poems extolled by Seamus Heaney. The original Gaelic is the poetry. My English translations are not the right noise. They are but clowns apeing kings. It must always be borne in mind, as Borges teaches us in one of his short stories, that a truly successful translation of Don Quixote would end up utterly indistinguishable from the original...

Int én bec

Int én bec
ro léic feit
do rinn guip
glanbuidi:
fo-ceird faíd
ós Loch Laíg,
lon do chraíb
charnbuidi.

This little bird

this little bird
whose note is heard
from tip of yellow-
lustered beak:
echoes its lay
across the bay
blackbird on yellow-
clustered peak.

Scél Leum Dúib
 (9-10th Century)

Scél lem dúib:
Dordaid dam,
snigid gaim,
ro-fáith sam;

Gáeth ard úar
ísel grían,
Gair a rith,
ruirtheach rían;

Rorúad rath,
ro-cleth cruth,
ro-gab gnáth
gingrann guth;

Ro-gab úacht
etti én
aigre ré:
é mo scél.

Brief Account

Brief account:
    Stag’s complaint.
Cold front.
    Summer’s spent.

High cold blow.
    Sun holds low.
Short the day.
    Sea just spray.

Bracken brown,
    Broken down.
Geese all mouth,
    Heading south.

Chilled each quill.
    Feathers’ flurry.
 Weather’s hoary.
    End of story!

And just for the fun of it, I will include here a lovely Chinese poem. We have already met the famous Li Bai and Wang Wei (above). But I really must introduce you to Yang Wanli (1127-1206), concerning whom Peter Harris has this to say:

As well as its other influences, Zen had an important formative influence on the way many Chinese and Japanese poets thought about writing poetry. The Chinese poet Yang Wanli, for example, believed that there was a strong connection between the sudden enlightenment of Zen as he understood it and a sudden awakening of the poet to the true art of poetry. Yang wrote his own best poems - few of them explicitly associated with Zen, but many of them paradoxical or slightly bizarre - after experiencing just such an awakening.
(Peter Harris, Foreword, Zen Poems, Selected and Edited by Peter Harris, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, David Campbell Publishers Ltd 1999)

 Yang Wanli's poem is as follows -

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.
(Romans 1:18-23)

"I've found a lot of joy in this work. I've experienced a lot of joy. I almost break down and cry for joy sometimes. Once I was doing a routine and it was feeling perfect without any thought of its perfection. The tremendousness of that...! There is a beauty that I can't really talk about; a tremendous, great, beautiful thing happening, and I was just feeling it. When I stepped out of the movement I didn't think about it, I simply felt gratitude in my heart, love and gratitude and I wanted to thank somebody. I turned around, and there was nobody to thank. So, I bowed. My body just went down. I bowed as if my body and heart just wanted to express a deep respect and gratitude for no 'reason'. (p 149)

In an article on Haiku, the Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock writes the following-

I wonder if, with these lines, we are not on the cusp of the matter. Here is the moment when objectivity teeters on the brink of Brute Otherness and meaninglessness. Of course, the Calvinist does not imagine either that the geese intend to cast their reflection, nor that the water has a mind to reflect them. But the Calvinist resists totally a reductionist view which concludes that geese and water are brute facts, that there is no transcendent Mind to suffuse them with individual and mutual coherence. The 'Rock' fathered them. The meaning of geese and water is infinitely personal in Him. Their concrete reality is founded in Him. He, not blank chance, wounds them and heals them. ("That the bones which Thou hast broken may rejoice" Psalm 51:8).

Consider the ravens. Consider the geese. Consider the sparrows, indeed - "Not one of them falls to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows" (Matt 10 29-31) "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Whom be the glory for ever. Amen" (Romans 11:36). 

And because all things are His, all things are also ours in Him -

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written,"He catches the wise in their own craftiness"; and again, "The LORD knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile."Therefore let no one boast in men. For all things are yours: whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world or life or death, or things present or things to come--all are yours. And you are Christ's, and Christ is God's. (1 Cor  3:19-23)