# The Way of Zen  Author:: Alan W. Watts  ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > This is why the Hindu-Buddhist insistence on the impermanence of the world is not the pessimistic and nihilistic doctrine which Western critics normally suppose it to be. Transitoriness is depressing only to the mind which insists upon trying to grasp. But to the mind which lets go and moves with the flow of change, which becomes, in Zen Buddhist imagery, like a ball in a mountain stream, the sense of transience or emptiness becomes a kind of ecstasy. ([Location 897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X76M&location=897)) > In another formulation of the Buddha’s teaching duhkha is one of the three characteristics of being, or becoming (bhava), whereof the other two are anitya, impermanence, and anatman, absence of any Self. These two terms are of basic importance. The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes. ([Location 967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X76M&location=967)) > when one tries to hold on to it, change is everywhere apparent, ([Location 971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X76M&location=971)) > In the same way, the anatman doctrine is not quite the bald assertion that there is no real Self (atman) at the basis of our consciousness. The point is rather that there is no Self, or basic reality, which may be grasped, either by direct experience or by concepts. ([Location 972](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X76M&location=972)) > Thus the desire for perfect control, of the environment and of oneself, is based on a profound mistrust of the controller. Avidya is the failure to see the basic self-contradiction of this position. From it therefore arises a futile grasping or controlling of life which is pure self-frustration, and the pattern of life which follows is the vicious circle which in Hinduism and Buddhism is called samsara, the Round of birth-and-death.10 ([Location 998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X76M&location=998)) > The Third Noble Truth is concerned with the ending of self-frustration, of grasping, and of the whole viciously circular pattern of karma which generates the Round. The ending is called nirvana, ([Location 1013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X76M&location=1013)) > If nirvana is “de-spiration” it is the act of one who has seen the futility of trying to hold his breath or life (prana) indefinitely, since to hold the breath is to lose it. Thus nirvana is the equivalent of moksha, release or liberation. ([Location 1018](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X76M&location=1018)) > It is primarily a way of liberation for those who have mastered the disciplines of social convention, of the conditioning of the individual by the group. Zen is a medicine for the ill effects of this conditioning, for the mental paralysis and anxiety which come from excessive self-consciousness. ([Location 2709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X76M&location=2709)) > This is a first principle in the study of Zen and of any Far Eastern art: hurry, and all that it involves, is fatal. For there is no goal to be attained. The moment a goal is conceived it becomes impossible to practice the discipline of the art, to master the very rigor of its technique. ([Location 3308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X76M&location=3308))