displaced the more spectacular ones as Zen became routinized and flamboyant
rishi-like masters no longer commanded much social charisma.
Such processes on the organizational plane do not exclude the reality of
the religious experience of persons such as Muso or Hakuin. Historical and
sociological writing inevitably becomes the external history of ideas and events.
This is so even when written by sympathetic religious participants (such as
Dumoulin), not to speak of secular sociologists. It is the same for every religion.
The Christians martyred for their faith in the early Tokugawa were, true
enough, actors and pawns in the political struggles of national unification; but
on an inner level many of them must have experienced the gospel of love and
salvation, whose worth cannot be judged outside itself. Our histories lose the
religious dimension of such experience. The language of religious evocation
and the language of scholarship tend to be mutually exclusive, separated by a
gestalt switch that defocuses the content of one from the other.
Writers of history and sociology can take heart from the fact that this
process is not merely imposed from outside by secular scholars; it has happened
within the historical development of every religion. Leaders of the faith have
been periodically aware of the undermining tendency of scholarship, even as
it derives from one’s own sacred books. Islam, Christianity, Buddhism alike all
went through early struggles against intellectualism, and all gave rise to aca-
demic traditions. Without such displacements there would be little history of
philosophy. The conflict cuts both ways. After the creation of a literate tradi-
tion, a permanent possibility in the space of religious positions is a movement
of anti-intellectualism, whether in the direction of fideist return to common-
sensical readings of the scriptures, or toward the mysticism of wordlessness.
The dialectic does not stop here. The scholastic path is a permanent possibility
as well. Scholasticism provides organizational continuity and transmits legiti-
mation and prestige; these advantages ensure that religious intellectualism will
be resumed again after every counter-movement.
The “history of Zen” is a contradiction in terms. Zen is the sophisticated
level of awareness that arises from recognizing the gestalt switch between
words and the ultimate reality they try to describe. Nevertheless, enlightenment
experiences do not arise of themselves. Falling down steps, receiving a slap on
the face, a sudden release from tense concentration are not religious experiences
until they are interpreted. That is why there is a network of Zen masters,
passing along the sensibilities which shape future possibilities of experience.
Zen enlightenment is stepping beyond words, but the Zen masters transform
it into poems and imagery, thereby making a transient inner experience into a
publicly accessible object. This is the path toward scholasticism, with its future
chains of verbal commentaries; but it is also the path along which other persons
can find their own transient ineffable experiences.^19
346 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths