Cav > Books: asia‎ (93)

"...History does not repeat, but it rhymes. For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill. This is the way of things in all things. There is light and there is dark. Always has been. Always will be. Civilization is the superstructure built on law and order that keeps the petty, the resentful, and the cruel away from the rest of us. Some societies have been better at this than others. Those who fail at repelling the repulsive fall to unhumanity—to a state of affairs in which human thriving is impossible and surviving improbable."

"The authors argue that it is humanity itself currently under threat. They unwrap the history of Communism, a dehumanizing philosophy of oppression, of denial of human rights and nihilism.
The reader is guided around the world, revealing the stories and histories the mainstream press won’t touch … from Cambodia, Nicaragua, Chile, Afghanistan and the Soviets, to Apartheid in South Africa. They bring us right up to President Donald Trump and January 6th, a day they correctly call “America’s Inverse Bastille.”

"While academic and reference titles explore the motives and agenda of household-name leaders during each left-wing upheaval, this book will give you on-the-ground descriptions of what it’s really like to witness (and fight) communist forces of change. We have recast the story of communism as individuals against individuals, as real people, to reveal how and why neighbors turn against neighbors. Why even yours might, against you. Along the way, we will reintroduce you to the household names of history, but in a way you’ve never seen before—we will tell their true stories.
And unlike some popular conservative commentators—who are nakedly reactionary and hyperbolically defeatist in their retellings of left-wing political history—this book will offer a measured tone. We will take this subject as seriously as deserved. And in the process, this book will inoculate you and by extension those you love from ever falling for revolutionary ideas that accelerate the end of everything."

"Before the Second World War, military conflicts were fought under orthodox conditions, usually termed “conventional warfare,” but several innovations had significantly changed combat, leading inextricably to the race for a nuclear weapon in the 1930s and 1940s. Conflicts had been fought by armies on horseback with guns of varying sophistication since the 16th century, but mechanized warfare and machine guns changed this calculus and set the stage for future combat by the end of World War I. Other sinister changes entered the fray during this conflict, such as chemical weapons like chlorine and mustard gas. The total warfare brought about by World War I and ensuing wars like the Spanish Civil War made the quest for the most powerful weapons somewhat necessary."

"This book, therefore, seeks to provide a comprehensive account of that relationship over the last eight decades. The story begins in 1943, when the Cairo Declaration first held forth the idea that Taiwan would be part of a Chinese state; it ends with the elections in a democratic, practically independent Taiwan in 2024. I could not have attempted such a survey without the excellent work that others have done on various aspects of those relations, though I have also benefited from primary sources from all three sides.7 There are, to be sure, inevitable gaps in the record. But there is enough material around to guide us along the paths that brought the three countries to their present moment—and thereby, perhaps, to show where they might go in the future..."

"Charles Robert Jenkins is, quite simply, a figure of lasting historical importance. He has lived a life that’s unique in twentiethcentury history. No other Westerner has survived so long in the world’s least known, least visited, and least understood country on the planet and been able to return to tell the tale. And what he has to say is vitally important: Is there any country in the world harder to get a handle on than North Korea? And while there are certainly rivals when it comes to the intensity of American diplomatic bungling, has any country been a U.S. foreign relations debacle so consistently for so many years? While native North Korean defectors and escapees from its gulags have made some horrors of that nation known to the world, Jenkins is the first Westerner able to provide a long-term, detailed view of this secretive and brutal society from the perspective of an outsider who became intimately familiar with its inner workings. I do not profess to know much about North Korea, but I’m confident Charles Robert Jenkins knows more about it than just about any foreigner on the planet."

"The curtain Robert draws back on the mundane, relentless, dehumanizing operation of the North Korean state—its wastes of money and labor on domestic spying rather than economic output, its language-debasing doublespeak, its interference in the most intimate details of its residents’ lives—helps demonstrate how insidious and debilitating, bizarre and oppressive the country is. The story of Robert’s life was more difficult to tell since it did not reach either extreme of the sensationalism spectrum. He is neither a villain nor a hero, just a man trying to cope with the guilt of a horrible mistake while eking out an existence in a country unimaginably strange and hostile. But I hope that this attention to the quotidian, this focus on the struggle of everyday life, has produced a more nuanced and valuable contribution to our understanding of North Korea."

"From nearby Seoul to faraway Washington, DC, many government officials and analysts boldly predicted—sometime in whispers, sometimes in shouts—widespread instability, a mass exodus into China, a military coup, imminent collapse. Behind all the doom mongering was one shared thought: surely this regime couldn’t survive the transition to a third totalitarian leader called Kim, much less to a twentysomething who’d been educated at fancy European schools and had an obsession about the Chicago Bulls—a young man with no known military or government background..."

"Death was all around us. We’d enter the market in the mornings to find women wailing and rocking in their arms children who had died during the night. As we plunged deep into the merchants’ stalls, we found the corpses of old men and women, mouths still agape as if, in their final moments, they wanted to say something, their eyes staring out, pleading with us to hear them. I always thought the place after death was peaceful. It was how my eomeoni had described it. But what I saw on the faces of the dead was anything but. It was as if they had got stuck looking at and feeling all their grief and pain..."

"It’s now that I remember that India is like Wonderland. In this other universe everyone seems mad and everything is upside down, back to front and infuriatingly bizarre. I’m Alice: fuzzy with feelings about my previous trip down the rabbit hole, I’m now flying straight back through the looking glass to a place where women are blamed for sleazy men and planes are sprayed when they fly from a clean city to a dirty one. In this world we applaud a dreadful landing that’s as fast and steep as a take-off, we jump up and tackle fellow passengers in a scrum at the door while the plane is still moving, and the air hostess gets off first."

"...I begin to regurgitate my repressed memories of why I never wanted to come here again. It’s a vomit of hatred and a rambling rage against the bullshit, the pushing, the shoving, the rip-offs, the cruelty, the crowds, the pollution, the weather, the begging, the performance of pity, the pissing, the shitting, the snotting, the spitting and the farting..."

"...in her place is a woman begging.
She hasn’t got a face.
Above her neck is a mass of melted flesh like burnt candle wax. Two pools of black stare out and stumps of burnt flesh wrapped in rags plead up at me. I retch in horror and run. This is my first glimpse of a dowry burning – where a woman is set alight in a ‘cooking accident’ because her husband or mother-in-law want more dowry money and attempt to kill to get it. If the bride dies, the husband can marry again and collect another dowry; if she lives, she can be shamed into leaving the house as damaged, useless goods. I want to scream with shock, fury and sadness but there’re too many people staring at me, following me and grabbing me. There’s just no room for rage."

"...Amid the manicured lawns of the embassy district cars slow down to avoid what appears to be a branch on the road. But it’s not a branch. It’s the twisted limbs of a beggar who’s been hit by a car; he is lying in the middle of the road crying and reaching out his hands for help. We pull over and Jonathan jumps out. But as he approaches the stricken man, a bus lurches to a halt; its driver gets out, grabs the beggar by his arm, drags him to the gutter and dumps him, his face and abdomen bleeding from the bitumen.
He’s dragged in anger, not in sympathy; human debris removed. The driver, his route now clear, jumps back on his bus and drives away.
India is the worst of humanity..."

"...It struggled through five years of bloody civil conflict with the destructive intervention of bellicose foreign powers, four years of a genocidal revolutionary regime, then liberation through invasion and a decade of military occupation by Vietnam, a hated and feared big neighbor, and throughout these years unceasing internecine warfare on its soil, continuing to this day."

"What follows is an attempt to retrace the events of nearly three decades as seen by a reporter who was granted the privilege of being taken into the confidence of many Cambodians, men and women whom I admired and whose hopes for their country I shared, as well as others. I recall with infinite sadness those among them who paid with their lives for staying when they could have fled, before total darkness enveloped Cambodia for four years that have known no equal in history."

"The excavated manuscripts support the theory that the Laozi cannot be ascribed to a single, historically identifiable author, but that it is, instead, a collection of separate “philosophical” sayings that were transmitted orally before they were written down. This is strongly suggested by the distinctive style of the text. A great many of the sayings are rhymed, and the language is dense and highly “concentrated.” Some of the sayings sound like an oracle, some of them like a riddle, and some seem to be ritual formulas.
Obviously, the Laozi was meant to be learnt by heart, and it was spoken aloud and orally transmitted. It is likely that in the earliest years of its circulation, written copies of the text—like the manuscripts found in the tombs—were the exception rather than the rule. If one wanted to provide the dead with a version of the Laozi, it had to be in the form of a scripture—in life there was, however, no need for this."

"If this theory about the origins of the Laozi is correct, the text is an anthology of wise sayings that were transmitted among the intellectual “elite” of ancient China, and it comprises materials from different sources and from different times. The earliest strata of the text may well be 2500 years old or more. The practice of putting artifacts and writings into the tombs of members of the aristocracy may have contributed to the increasing “literalization” of the Laozi and other “books.” When writing became easier and more common (for instance, through the invention of paper during the Han dynasty), the present-day Laozi began to take shape.
When this had happened, philosophers and literati like Wang Bi prepared their own editions of the text by adding commentaries and interpretations. At this point in history, the Laozi had ceased to be an orally transmitted collection of sayings and finally became a “classical scripture” known as the Daode-jing, which means:
“The Classical Scripture (Chinese: jing) about Dao and De.” Using a metaphor from the Laozi, one might say that over several centuries the Laozi had changed from “uncarved wood” into an elaborate wood carving. Thus, it is impossible to identify a single author who, at a specific point in history, composed the “authentic” Daodejing. It is rather a “collaborative” work that emerged within a philosophic tradition over a long period of time. There never was a person called Laozi who had “written” the text that was later given his name."

"Before we deep dive into it, let me share with you what I did and bdidn’t do. The primary source of data for this book is the seven years of research I did between 2016-2023. I conducted interviews with over a hundred people in London, San Francisco, New Zealand, Hungary, Germany, Portugal, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. In the beginning, these were very ordinary interviews as I didn’t have any knowledge of dating cultures – I was in the dark.
However, as I started to gain more and more awareness, these interviews got a lot deeper and more personal. For this reason, whenever people shared their experiences with me, I promised them anonymity. Consequently, following best practice in qualitative social science research, all the names of those whose stories I tell are pseudonyms.
To expand my reach beyond those cities, my assistant, Maria Nosyk, did an outstanding job helping me. She gathered information from all around the world through several Facebook groups. She collected hundreds of quality responses – many of which you will find throughout the book. Without her dedication, this book would not be where it is today. Huge thanks to Maria and everyone who contributed with their valuable feedback!"

"...I was coming home to Marin County, California, a predominately liberal community critical of the war. And while Marin culture was tolerant, spiritual, and forward-looking in many respects, I doubted I’d get a free pass as a homegrown guy who spent a year of his young life in the jungles and bush of Vietnam, despite my in-step political leanings.
I wasn’t mistaken. Soon after landing on U.S. soil, I tasted the bitterness of what it was like being a Vietnam War veteran. It wasn’t pretty..."

"The numbers below, by themselves, tell their own story. They tell of pervasive and wanton destruction, profound human pain, and emotional isolation. They represent a repulsive legacy that will indelibly darken humanity. They need no embellishment to still the heart and shock the conscience.
• 2.7 million Americans served in uniform in Vietnam.
• 58,148 Americans were killed in action (KIA) in Vietnam (including medic Thomas P. Coffino, the brother of the coauthor of this book).
• Of those Americans KIA, the average age was twenty-three; more than 60 percent were twenty or younger; five were sixteen; the oldest was sixty-two; and more than 17,000 were married.
• It is estimated that almost 300,000 Vietnam veterans eventually died from Agent Orange exposure during the war.
• 2,338 Americans were missing in action; more than 1,600 are unaccounted for today.
• 766 Americans became prisoners of war (POW) and of them, 114 died in captivity.
• More than 303,000 Americans were wounded.
• More than 75,000 American soldiers were severely disabled as a result of the war. More than 5,200 lost limbs, and more than 1,000 suffered multiple amputations.
• Countless Vietnam veterans have committed suicide.
• One study shows that almost 20 percent of Vietnam veterans returned with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
• Between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in war.
• Approximately 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange contamination during the war, of whom 400,000 have died from exposure.
• More than 300,000 Vietnamese “boat people” trying to flee Vietnam either died or were killed by pirates.
• As many as 2,000,000 Vietnamese civilians (North and South) about 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers died during the war.
• South Korea suffered more than 4,000 dead, Thailand about 3,000, Australia more than 500, and New Zealand some three dozen.
• The number of families from all affected countries that were devastated is countless."

"...Today, we are constantly contending with algorithms of all kinds, each one attempting to guess what we are thinking of, seeking, and desiring before we may even be aware of the answers. When I write an email, my Gmail app predicts which words and phrases I am trying to type and fills them in for me, as if reading my mind. Spotify stocks its screen with the musicians and albums it predicts that I am likely to listen to, which I often end up selecting simply out of habit. When I unlock my phone, photos from the past I may want to see—labeled “memories,” as if they existed in my subconscious—are preloaded, as are suggestions for apps I may want to open and friends I may want to text. Instagram offers a mood board of what its algorithm perceives as my interests: top-down photos of food, architecture snapshots, looping clips of prestige television shows. TikTok serves me an inexplicable avalanche of videos of people retiling their showers, and I inexplicably keep watching them, compelled in spite of myself. Surely there is more to my identity as a consumer of culture?"

"Filterworld, the title of this book, is my word for the vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed. Though Filterworld has also changed politics, education, and interpersonal relationships, among many other facets of society, my focus is on culture. Whether visual art, music, film, literature, or choreography, algorithmic recommendations and the feeds that they populate mediate our relationship to culture, guiding our attention toward the things that fit best within the structures of digital platforms. The automated recommendations are filters that both sift what gets attention from what is ignored and subtly warp the appearance of these things, like a photo filter on Instagram, exaggerating some qualities and downplaying others. The cultural successes of Filterworld are obvious. They include phenomena like the countrified TikTok dance that propelled Lil Nas X’s 2018 song “Old Town Road” to global fame; the cliché design trends that plague Instagram, like minimalist interiors and the monotonous sans serif logos that fashion brands have adopted in recent years; and the rage-triggering deluge of meaningless Twitter controversies."

"...In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers. While this shift has lowered many cultural barriers to entry, since anyone can make their work public online, it has also resulted in a kind of tyranny of real-time data.
Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is judged, and what gets attention is dictated by equations developed by Silicon Valley engineers. The outcome of such algorithmic gatekeeping is the pervasive flattening that has been happening across culture. By flatness I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations."

"...My Bosniak driver believed the ethnic conflict in his country was horrific and exceptional, but he was only partly right: it was horrific—but utterly unexceptional. Collectively, ethnic conflicts around the world, from Bosnia to Sri Lanka, have killed more than ten million people since World War II.
Many Americans reflexively tune out news of these conflicts. In the words of one satirist, it’s just the “unspellables” killing the “unpronounceables”—peoples too distant or inexplicable to pay attention to. But as Americans, we need to pay attention, not just for the sake of the millions around the world suffering from ethnic division, but for our own sake. We must deepen our understanding of what it takes for diverse ethnic groups to get along and share a country, for America is rapidly becoming vastly more multiethnic..."

"...Thus, as the United States has veered from melting pot to multiculturalism, there has been little serious discussion about how similar course changes have worked out in other countries. The reality is that both the melting pot and multiculturalist models have been tried many times in history. In some cases, societies have shifted from one to the other. It’s worth examining how it has worked out for them; perhaps we can distill some useful lessons from their experiences. That is what this book endeavors to accomplish."

"After considering the terrible consequences of ethnic divisions in countries like Bosnia and Sri Lanka, it is disheartening to see Americans advance the same types of policies and rhetoric that promoted and toxified those divisions. America has a regrettable past of racial and ethnic discrimination, but if the examples in this book teach anything, it is that the solution to past segregation is not even more segregation. The answer to past racial discrimination is not even more racial discrimination. Two African countries demonstrate this best.
While it was a British protectorate, Botswana endured extensive white racism. Yet it managed to recover quickly to become one of the developing world’s outstanding success stories. It achieved this not with compensatory preferences and racial payback but by completely eliminating racial and ethnic distinctions and by fostering botho, the Batswana version of asabiyah. It also followed the melting pot model, which has repeatedly demonstrated its effectiveness since the time of ancient Rome.
In proportional terms, Rwanda’s genocide stands out as one of the worst racist crimes of all time. Although the genocide occurred only a few decades ago, Rwanda has managed to recover spectacularly from it. Like Botswana, Rwanda accomplished this by “erasing race” and adopting the melting pot model. Rather than instituting ethnic preferences like affirmative action, it outlawed racial and ethnic distinctions altogether. Rather than dividing people into groups, it has sought to unify them with institutions like umuganda. Rather than brooding on past injustices, it has cultivated the shared asabiyah lauded by Ibn Khaldun.
The path taken by Botswana and Rwanda lies open to America. It starts with resolute and unwavering commitments to principles like those made by Israel Zangwill in The Melting Pot and by the children in Rwanda’s Nyange school:
There are no groups. We are all Americans."

"...That’s not to say we don’t lie; indeed, multiple studies have found that lying is an inherent part of human nature, and who hasn’t told a white lie to protect feelings or get out of a spot of trouble? Still, we continue to tell our children not to lie, and for good reason. Even when we put aside morals and ethics and just focus on the practicality of the thing, lying is more often than not a damaging practice that tends to spiral out of control, creating chasms and domino effects that are impossible to reverse. If this is the effect that lying can have on our individual lives, then you can imagine the immense impact it’s had on history."

"Over the next fifty chapters, we’ll traverse some of the darkest events in human history. At times it can feel inescapably bleak, but in that mire of lies there is always light. Because, when we peel back the lies of history, we can gain a better understanding of not only history itself but the legacies of the past we’re left with today. This isn’t so much a book about uncovering the truth, as it is one of untangling the web of deceit that hid it and looking at why that web was there in the first place."

"...While some of those microbes might be harming or even killing us, what about the rest? Could they be helping us heal and grow, or even think and feel? Could our microbes be in conversation with our immune system – and explain why diseases related to it are increasingly common? Or why we get cancer, what the appendix does, or even why some drugs work and others don’t? For the best part of two decades I have sampled the microbiomes of generous patients undergoing surgery in theatre number three, in my quest to find answers to these questions. I’ve also followed the work of colleagues across the world and we’ve shared our findings and ideas. The answers have been surprising, beyond what we could have imagined.
Today, I am driven by the idea that the rise in the collection of disabling chronic diseases has been caused, over just eight decades, by the radical disruption to the colonies of microorganisms that live in and around us. And that, in our quest to cure the world of infectious diseases, we’ve inadvertently created a new pandemic of non-infectious ones. This book is my way of sharing my own journey to these conclusions, and my hope is that this will start a conversation about how we can provide a different type of medicine. The true promise of microbiome science is in disease prevention."

"The microscopic life forms that preside over our health and wellness are increasingly frustrated with the mistreatment inflicted upon them by hyperglobalization – and they have a formidable molecular arsenal with which they are demonstrating their displeasure. The result is that although we are living longer than ever before in history, we are not living happier.
Medicine doesn’t have all the answers for this paradox. In response, some of my patients are now returning to ancient strategies for the treatment of their modern maladies…"

"Transgender people also face a disproportionate risk of death – double that of cisgender people – in large part because of a lack of access to adequate healthcare and high rates of violence and discrimination."

"For example, in the developed world, women who are female at birth typically live longer than their biological male equivalents and are less likely than men to experience a heart attack, cancer (excluding those found in sex organs), alcoholism, cirrhosis, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia, Autism Spectrum Disorders (even when accounting for diagnostic bias)23, 24 or substance abuse.
Because of socioeconomic and gender-based social inequalities that exacerbate any underlying genetic variance that exists between the sexes, women also experience higher rates of obesity, stroke, gallstones, autoimmune disease, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s and eating disorders. For girls aged fifteen to nineteen, self-harm is the second leading cause of death, globally, after pregnancy.25 In the developing world, millions of women still don’t have access to basic health services and modern contraceptives. As a result, the burden of communicable diseases and perinatal and nutritional disorders remains unequally distributed between the sexes."

"From the beginning of the Duterte era, recording these deaths became my job. As a field correspondent for Rappler in Manila, I was one of then reporters covering the results of the president’s pledge to destroy anyone— without charge or trial—whom he or the police or any of a number of vigilantes suspected of taking or selling drugs. The volume of Duterte’s dead was at times overwhelming, as was covering the powerful in a country nwhere the powerful refuse to be held to account."

"My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.
I can tell you about those places. There have been many of them in the last decade. They are the coastal villages after typhoons, where babies were zipped into backpacks after the body bags ran out. They are the hillsides in the south, where journalists were buried alive in a layer cake of cars and corpses. They are the cornfields in rebel country and the tent cities outside blackened villages and the backrooms where mothers whispered about the children that desperation had forced them to abort.
It’s handy to have a small vocabulary in my line of work. The names go first, then the casualty counts. Colors are good to get the description squared away. The hill is green. The sky is black. The backpack is purple, and so is the bruising on the woman’s left cheek.
Small words are precise. They are exactly what they are and are faster to type when the battery is running down..."
"...Kill, for example. It’s a word my president uses often. He said it at least 1,254 times in the first six months of his presidency, in a variety of contexts and against a range of enemies. He said it to four-year-old Boy Scouts, promising to kill people who got in the way of their future. He said it to overseas workers, telling them there were jobs to be had killing drug addicts at home. He told mayors accused of drug dealing to repent, resign, or die.
He threatened to kill human rights activists if the drug problem worsened. He told cops he would give them medals for killing. He told journalists they could be legitimate targets of assassination.
“I’m not kidding,” he said in a campaign rally in 2016. “When I become president, I’ll tell the military, the police, that this is my order: find these people and kill them, period.”
I know only a few dozen of the dead by name. It doesn’t matter to the president. He has enough names for them all. They are addicts, pushers, users, dealers, monsters, madmen."

"Our very success with water has allowed us to become water illiterate. But the golden age of water is rapidly coming to an end. The last century has conditioned us to think that water is naturally abundant, safe, and cheap— that it should be, that it will be. We’re in for a rude shock.
We are in the middle of a water crisis already, in the United States and around the world. The experts realize it (the Weather Channel already has a dedicated burning-orange logo for its drought reports), but even in areas with serious water problems, most people don’t seem to understand.
We are entering a new era of water scarcity—not just in traditionally dry or hard-pressed places like the U.S. Southwest and the Middle East, but in places we think of as water-wealthy, like Atlanta and Melbourne. The three things that we have taken to be the natural state of our water supply—abundant, cheap, and safe—will not be present together in the decades ahead. We may have water that is abundant and cheap, but it will be “reuse water,” for things like lawn watering or car washing, not for drinking; we will certainly have drinking water that is safe, and it may be abundant, but it will not be thoughtlessly inexpensive."

"Zen is decidedly not a system founded upon logic and analysis. If anything, it is the antipode to logic, by which I mean the dualistic mode of thinking. There may be an intellectual element in Zen, for Zen is the whole mind, and in it we find a great many things; but the mind is not a composite thing that is to be divided into so many faculties, leaving nothing behind when the dissection is over. Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis; nor has it any set doctrines which are imposed on its followers for acceptance.
In this respect Zen is quite chaotic if you choose to say so. Probably Zen followers may have sets of doctrines, but they have them on their own account, and for their own benefit; they do not owe the fact to Zen.
Thereore, there are in Zen no sacred books or dogmatic tenets, nor are there any symbolic formulae through which an access might be gained into the signification of Zen. If I am asked, then, what Zen teaches, I would answer, Zen teaches nothing. Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one’s own mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way."

"Is Zen a religion? It is not a religion in the sense that the term is popularly understood; for Zen has no God to worship, no ceremonial rites to observe, no future abode to which the dead are destined, and, last of all, Zen has no soul whose welfare is to be looked after by somebody else and whose immortality is a matter of intense concern with some people. Zen is free from all these dogmatic and “religious” encumbrances.
When I say there is no God in Zen, the pious reader may be shocked, but this does not mean that Zen denies the existence of God; neither denial nor affirmation concerns Zen. When a thing is denied, the very denial involves something not denied. The same can be said of affirmation. This is inevitable in logic. Zen wants to rise above logic, Zen wants to find a higher affirmation where there are no antitheses. Therefore, in Zen, God is neither denied nor insisted upon; only there is in Zen no such God as has been conceived by Jewish and Christian minds. For the same reason that Zen is not a philosophy, Zen is not a religion."

"Zen is not to be confounded with a form of meditation as practised by “New Thought” people, or Christian Scientists, or Hindu Sannyasins, or some Buddhists. Dhyana, as it is understood by Zen, does not correspond to the practice as carried on in Zen. A man may meditate on a religious or philosophical subject while disciplining himself in Zen, but that is only incidental; the essence of Zen is not there at all. Zen purposes to discipline the mind itself, to make it its own master, through an insight into its proper nature. This getting into the real nature of one’s own mind or soul is the fundamental object of Zen Buddhism. Zen, therefore, is more than meditation and Dhyana in its ordinary sense. The discipline of Zen consists in opening the mental eye in order to look into the very reason of existence.
To meditate, a man has to fix his thought on something; for instance, on the oneness of God, or his infinite love, or on the impermanence of things. But this is the very thing Zen desires to avoid. If there is anything Zen strongly emphasizes it is the attainment of freedom; that is, freedom from all unnatural encumbrances. Meditation is something artificially put on; it does not belong to the native activity of the mind. Upon what do the fowl of the air meditate? Upon what do the fish in the water meditate? They fly; they swim. Is not that enough?

"...When Joshu (Chao-chou) was asked what the Tao (or the truth of Zen) was, he answered, “Your everyday life, that is the Tao.” In other words, a quiet, self-confident, and trustful existence of your own—this is the truth of Zen, and what I mean when I say that Zen is pre-eminently practical. It appeals directly to life, not even making reference to a soul or to God, or to anything that interferes with or disturbs the ordinary course of living. The idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows. There is nothing extraordinary or mysterious about Zen. I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of this desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighbouring woods:—in all these I am practising Zen, I am living Zen. No wordy discussion is necessary, nor any explanation. I do not know why—and there is no need of explaining, but when the sun rises the whole world dances with joy and everybody’s heart."