“a Chinese poem says: Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple. “What is the Tao?” A Zen master answers, “Usual life is the very Tao.” “How does one bring oneself into accord with it?” “If you try to accord with it, you will get away from it.” For to imagine that there is a “you” separate from life which somehow has to accord with life is to fall straight into the trap.” The same is true of the universe: no amount of intellectual analysis will explain it, for philosophy and science can only reveal its mechanism, never its meaning or, as the Chinese say, its Tao. To understand these things, you must live and move with them as they are alive. A symphony is not explained by a mathematical analysis of its notes the mystery of a woman’s beauty is not revealed by a postmortem dissection and no one ever understood the wonder of a bird on the wing by stuffing it and putting it in a glass case. “Zen master is not trying to give you ideas about life he is trying to give you life itself, to make you realize life in and around you, to make you live it instead of being a mere spectator, a mere pedant absorbed in the dry bones of something which the life has long deserted. Wherever you stand is the top, and it revolves only because you are pushing it round with your own feet.” From the standpoint of eternity we never can and never do leave the top of the wheel, for if a circle is set in infinite space it has neither top nor bottom.
Yet within this there is a still deeper truth. Thus by not trying to seize the moment, we keep it, for the second we fail to walk on we cease to remain still. For at every moment we stand, as it were, on the top of a wheel immediately we try to cling to that moment, to that particular point of the wheel, it is no longer at the top and we are off our balance. If he exceeds that speed, he will topple forward and slip off the wheel onto his face. As he walks, the wheel is revolving toward him beneath his feet, and if he is not to be carried backward by it and flung to the ground he must walk at the same speed as the wheel turns. Consider life as a revolving wheel set upright with man walking on its tire. Both points of view, however, are true, for to attain that highest wisdom we must at once walk on and remain still. The one seems to reflect events as they pass, and the other to move forward with them. The latter are as those who dance to music, keeping pace with its movement and letting their limbs flow with it as unceasingly and as unhesitatingly as clouds respond to the breath of wind. Like Chuang-tzu’s perfect man, they employ their minds as a mirror: it grasps nothing it refuses nothing it receives, but does not keep. The former are as those who listen to music, letting the flow of notes pass through their minds without trying either to arrest them or to speed them on.
And there are those who say that we must move on as life moves, never stopping for a moment either in fear of what is to come or to turn a regretful glance at what has gone. There are those who say that to attain the highest wisdom we must be still and calm, immovable in the midst of turmoil. “ALMOST EVERY FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF LIFE can be expressed in two opposite ways.
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