Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen by Alan WattsKerouac later received criticism from Snyder and other American Buddhists such as Alan Watts, a prominent scholar of Asian religions, for his portrayal of Buddhism and Zen that relied on his experiential bias instead of serious practice (Lott 172). In fact, it was Watts who would criticize the Beats on their Zen affinities shortly after The Dharma Bums was published in his famous written work Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen. Watts was concerned with distinguishing formal Zen from the hybrid style of Buddhism the Beats had engineered (Beat Zen). For rather different reasons, Japanese people tend to be as uneasy in themselves as Westerners, having a sense of social shame quite as acute as our more metaphysical sense of sin. This was especially true of the class most attracted to Zen, the samurai. Ruth Benedict, in that very uneven work Chrysanthemum and Sword, was, I think, perfectly correct in saying that the attraction of Zen to the samurai class was its power to get rid of an extremely awkward self-consciousness induced in the young. Part-and-parcel of this self-consciousness is the Japanese compulsion to compete with oneself — a compulsion which turns every craft and skill into a marathon of self-discipline. Although the attraction of Zen lay in the possibility of liberation from self-consciousness, the Japanese version of Zen fought fire with fire, overcoming the "self observing the self" by bringing it to an intensity in which it exploded. How remote from the regimen of the Japanese Zen monastery are the words of the great T'ang master Lin-chi: loamy @olmaz As I said before, I’ll concede that “misogyny” is maybe not the right word here, and is maybe too extreme. In America, it has become synonymous with “sexist”. But let’s not sit here and pretend that being horny for a woman’s jiggly breasts in a game equates to liking and/or appreciating women, or some great act of feminism. C’mon, now! You say I’m being judgmental, and sure, maybe I am. But lol to me being judgmental about “how a female body should or should not be represented”. Absolutely, there are indeed women with large breasts in the world—yep they do exist! And do they have a right to be depicted in a videogame? Yep they sure do! And was that what this game was doing? And this culture of depicting female characters with sexy outfits and giant jiggling breasts? A favor to large-breasted women by depicting them as fully-realized humans, worth more than their bodies, which exist for viewers and gamers to control for their pleasure? Ummmmm… I don’t think so? It seems like maybe the developers (or someone at the company) likely realized that too, and toned it down. So good for them? I guess…?

Foreign religions can be immensely attractive and highly overrated by those who know little of their own, and especially by those who have not worked through and grown out of their own. This is why the displaced or unconscious Christian can so easily use either beat or square Zen to justify himself. The one wants a philosophy to justify him in doing what he pleases. The other wants a more plausible authoritative salvation than the Church or the psychiatrists seem to be able to provide. Furthermore, the atmosphere of Japanese Zen is free from all one's unpleasant childhood associations with God the Father and Jesus Christ — though I know many young Japanese who feel just the same way about their early training in Buddhism. But the true character of Zen remains almost incomprehensible to those who have not surpassed the immaturity of needing to be justified, whether before the Lord God or before a paternalistic society. I see no real quarrel in either extreme. There was never a spiritual movement without its excesses and distortions. The experience of awakening which truly constitutes Zen is too timeless and universal to be injured. The extremes of beat Zen need alarm no one since, as Blake said, “the fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” As for square Zen, “authoritative” spiritual experiences have always had a way of wearing thin, and thus of generating the demand for something genuine and unique which needs no stamp. The Dharma Bums would go on to influence a generation of spiritual seekers and counter-cultural reformers in the 1960s who used the book to guide them through their existential and social crises. The book helped facilitate the emerging value structures that were represented by freedom from life’s social constraints during the 1960s (Tonkinson 61). Scholar and author of Buddhism in America, Richard Hughes Seager, credits Kerouac for helping to establish a model of the non-conformist religious practitioner which helped create the cultural image of the counter-cultural seeker, in part preserving his legacy for a future generation of American seekers with The Dharma Bums (42). The appeal of Zen, as of other forms of Eastern philosophy, is that it unveils behind the urgent realm of good and evil a vast region of oneself about which there need be no guilt or recrimination, where at last the self is indistinguishable from God. Furthermore, when Kerouac gives his philosophical final statement, “I don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference”—the cat is out of the bag, for there is a hostility in these words which clangs with self-defense. But just because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say “To hell with it,” nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes.I have known followers of both extremes to come up with perfectly clear satori experiences, for since there is no real "way" to satori the way you are following makes very little difference.

In 1958, Alan Watts published the following essay in the Chicago Review. The essay examines two extreme interpretations of Zen — “beat Zen” and “square Zen” — which arose in the West in the 20th Century. In addition to his contribution in The Chicago Review in 1958, Snyder translated a traditional Chinese Zen work of Han Shan’s and had it published under the same title Cold Mountain Poems (Fields 214). Later that year, Snyder returned to Japan where he undertook seven years of formal Zen study, attending sesshins and committing intermittently to monastic life (Fields 222). By the time he returned in 1966, the cultural landscape of America had been dramatically altered, both by the Vietnam War and by the counter-culture movement (Fields 248). For Kerouac, however, his new book could not have been written at a better time. Three months before The Dharma Bums was published, Time Magazine released a special edition specifically on Zen and said that “Zen Buddhism is growing more chic by the moment” (Tonkinson xvii.). The cultural fad of Zen coincided with Kerouac’s wish to spread the dharma. He even said he wrote The Dharma Bums with the intention of popularizing Buddhism in America (Tonkinson xviii.).Beat Zen is a complex phenomenon. It ranges from a use of Zen for justifying sheer caprice in art, literature, and life to a very forceful social criticism and “digging of the universe” such as one may find in the poetry of Ginsberg and Snyder, and, rather unevenly, in Kerouac. But, as I know it, it is always a share too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen. It is all very well for the philosopher, but when the poet (Ginsberg) says— live the second issue is one of censorship, and especially self-censorship. I personally view any kind of limitation imposed on an artistic product (or even just an entertainment product for adults) a bad thing in general, unless it is overtly illegal. Why would anyone lessen something as innocuous as a "boob jiggle" in a game that is not meant to be mature (in the real sense of the term) nor realistic?

Finished System. It helps to control and manage the state of unwrapping UV Islands (Finished/Unfinished) by tags and visually. In the summer of 1957 Irving Rosenthal offered me the job of Guest Poetry Editor on the Review. The title had been cooked up, he explained, because technically I was ineligible, having left the midway a few years before. I remember him saying he wanted "only the best poems" and to hell with literary politics or equal representation of all schools of contemporary poetry. I was delighted. The conversations that occurred between the poets in San Francisco during this period often centered on Buddhism and were referred to as “Dharma confrontation” by Ginsberg. These dialogues helped orient the writers in their moral and philosophical positions within Buddhism (Fields 214). This juncture between poets signified an important moment in the lives of the writers from the two coastal literary scenes (Prothero 16). It would be through the friendships established during this period that Buddhism and Beat writing would undergo its most fertile synthesis. Furthermore, when Kerouac gives his philosophical final statement, "I don't know. I don't care. And it doesn't make any difference"— the cat is out of the bag, for there is a hostility in these words which clangs with self-defense. But just because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say "To hell with it," nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes. Zen UV Transform tool. Move, Rotate, Scale, Fit, Align and Flip Islands in 3D View and UV Editor using Zen UV Gizmo.

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Edington, Stephen D. The Beat Face of God: The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides. Nashua: Trafford Publishing, 2005.

Conventional thought is, in brief, the confusion of the concrete universe of nature with the conceptual things, events, and values of linguistic and cultural symbolism. For in Taoism and Zen the world is seen as an inseparably interrelated field or continuum, no part of which can actually be separated from the rest or valued above or below the rest. It was in this sense that Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch, meant that “fundamentally not one thing exists,” for he realized that things are terms, not entities. They exist in the abstract world of thought, but not in the concrete world of nature. Thus one who actually perceives or feels this to be so no longer feels that he is an ego, except by definition. He sees that his ego is his persona or social role, a somewhat arbitrary selection of experiences with which he has been taught to identify himself. (Why, for example, do we say “I think” but not “I am beating my heart”?) Having seen this, he continues to play his social role without being taken by it. He does not precipitately adopt a new role or play the role of having no role at all. He plays it cool.

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The old Chinese Zen masters were steeped in Taoism. They saw nature in its total interrelatedness, and saw that every creature and every experience is in accord with the Tao of nature just as it is. This enabled them to accept themselves as they were, moment by moment, without the least need to justify anything. They didn’t do it to defend themselves or to find an excuse for getting away with murder. They didn’t brag about it and set themselves apart as rather special. On the contrary, their Zen was wu-shih, which means approximately “nothing special” or “no fuss.” But Zen is “fuss” when it is mixed up with Bohemian affectations, and “fuss” when it is imagined that the only proper way to find it is to run off to a monastery in Japan or to do special exercises in the lotus posture five hours a day. And I will admit that the very hullabaloo about Zen, even in such an article as this, is also fuss—but a little less so. Match and Stitch operator to match Islands position, rotation, scale and stitch vertices if it’s possible. When Kerouac gives his philosophical final statement, “l don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference”— the cat is out of the bag, for there is a hostility in these words which clangs with self-defense. But just because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say “To hell with it,” nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes. It is indeed the basic intuition of Zen that there is an ultimate standpoint from which “ anything goes.” In the celebrated words of the master Yun-men, “ Every day is a good day.” Or as is said in the Hsin-hsin Ming: With characteristic eloquence, Watts articulates the strengths and follies of each of these interpretations and also attempts to compare them to a more “authentic” Zen — Zen as taught and practiced in China, where it originated, during the 5th to 9th centuries CE. Some scholars have criticized Alan Watts for being a universalist — i.e. claiming that there is a discernible “essence” of Zen, or a “true Zen,” or a single universal satori (sudden enlightenment) experience. These critics argue that the nature of Zen will differs across cultures and across history, as the individual will always process the practices, teachings, and even the satori experience through various filters of identity and cultural conditioning.