Sampling Zen

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30965, 22 January 1966, Page 4

Sampling Zen

Psychotherapy and Meditation. By Jack Huber. Gollancz. 128 pp.

It is astonishing that so many people of Western birth and education seek to find in Eastern faiths and disciplines what they fail to find in the faith and discipline within their own environment and the accumulated religious knowledge of their own race. In this book the author, a trained teacher of psychotherapy in America, makes two journeys, one to Japan and the other to Burma, to find enlightenment and to attain a satisfaction hitherto, apparently, denied him. The author first went to Japan for a five-day course under a Zen practitioner. It should be remembered that Zen is not a religion; it is a mental discipline by which one may obtain inner freedom leading to what is called “The Great Satisfaction.” The satisfaction is not defined. In this five-day course the author learned how to make his mind “immobile,” for only as this is practised can freedom from “inner pain” and “satisfaction” come. The book is almost a diary, for it gives the daily schedule of treatments consisting of certain postures, breathing, and the concentration of the mind on particular sounds. At the close of the fifth day the author declares he found the “Great Satisfaction,” which apparently has to do with a vision of his own “unconditional nature.” The treatment he underwent in Burma was different from the Japanese Zen—which the “master” of the Burmese school was very definite in declaring. The author had agreed to a three weeks’ treatment, but left Burma for America within a few days, feeling that he had got all

he needed from the Zen school in Japan. The Burmese method consisted of concentrating on the abdomen, breathing, walking and uttering certain sounds. This •discipline was kept up for twenty hours a day. The book is superficial. One feels that the author could have attained what he felt he needed in his own home and work without going East for something that is vague though coloured with a mist of mysticism.