A little info about R. H. Blyth

Seventeen years ago a friend did me a favor that I shall never forget, by presenting me with a copy of R.H. Blyth's Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, published [previously] by Hokuseido Press (please see the note at the bottom of the page for current distributor information). Actually, she dropped off a whole box of books, and worthy books they were, but when I picked up Blyth, and started reading, I kept reading it, to the exclusion of all else. Then I went out and got his other books - the five-volume Zen and Zen Classics, the four-volume Haiku (one volume for each season), the two-volume A History of Haiku - and read them, too, and have been reading them ever since. Seldom have I encountered books that were so much fun, and that made so much sense.
Some authors are overlooked because their subject is overlooked. The opposite, I suspect, is more nearly the case with Blyth. So many books have been published in English about Zen, and about its relationship to literature and art and finance and sex and self-esteem, that Blyth's works have to some extent been buried, like the first-fallen leaves of autumn. But Blyth's sensibility has little to do with New Age yearnings for self-improvement or nonchallenging enlightenment, or with romantic idealizations of the exotic East, for that matter, with the notion that Zen Buddhism is nice or sweet or friendly. His books are vinegar among these seductive perfumes. Where they are vague, he is specific; where they are obscurantist, he is clear. Wry, ironic, commonsensical, pessimistic, and rigorously nonmetaphysical, Blyth eschews all pieties, including those that tend to elevate one's esteem for Zen itself. Blyth writes that:

Zen is the essence of Christianity, of Buddhism, of culture, of all that is good in the daily life of ordinary people. But that does not mean that we are not to smash it flat if we get the slightest opportunity.

Impatient with the love of the mystical that enchants priests and poetasters, Blyth insisted that Zen is a wholly human invention, as useful and unpretentious as a hoe. "Comparisons are odious," he writes, "but odiousness is one of the qualities--almost the chief quality--of the universe. Zen means not choosing, not praising or blaming, not liking or loathing--so they say. But real Zen means choosing, praising, blaming, liking, loathing--humourously." Nor did he ever fall victim to that fatal weakness of so many devotees of Zen and its antecedent, the myth of the supernatural:
Levitation was common in Kyozan's life. He shows no surprise at it. Most of such bird-men seem to have come from India. Hot air rises.

Though Blyth was a great teacher, he was sharply skeptical of the very act of teaching. "All teaching," he wrote--in words that ought to be engraved over the entrance of every school--"must be more or less malicious."
About the life of Reginald Blyth I know little, except that he was English, was living in Japan when war broke out, was incarcerated as a prisoner of war and later taught in Japanese universities, and died in 1964. He was extraordinarily well-read (as well read as, say, Borges), wore his learning lightly and was a respected translator of haiku. Having learned from Blyth's books for years, I should like, as one writer to another, to pay him two specific compliments--though he would have said that was two too many.
The first is that he has an eye for a good story. He could recount an anecdote with a skill equal to that of the great American Zen master Groucho Marx. Here is Blyth debunking sentiment:
Nansen was asked by a monk, "Where will the master be gone to in a hundred years' time?" Nansen said, "I'll be a water-colored ox." The monk said, "May I follow you or not?" Nansen said, "Well, if you do, bring a mouthful of grass with you."

Offering advice:
I was once riding with Mr. Warner, who saved Kyoto from bombing. He said that he was thinking of becoming a Roman Catholic. I said to him, "Mr. Warner, don't believe in anything which you have to defend."

Recounting the death of Fuke, "the most eccentric of all the Zen monks,":
Stretching out his hand [Fuke said], "Give me some money!"

My second comment is that Blyth ranks with Einstein as one of the freest men who ever lived. In a brief autobiographical essay, written in 1948 for a student newspaper, he permitted himself a brief expression of his sense of liberty:
The aim of life, it's only aim, is to be free. Free of what? Free to do what? Only to be free, that is all. Free through ourselves, free to be sad, to be in pain; free to grow old and die. That is what our soul desires, and this freedom it must have; and shall have.

If the many worlds that we live in today are, as we may optimistically suppose, destined to merge into something more like one world, this unification will come about, I suspect, not so much because computers or communications or finance draw the various cultures together, but because each comes to see that the others have something of inestimable value to offer. What Blyth has done (and that is not all that he has done) is to show us a slice of what Japanese thought has to offer us--not cars or TV sets but the earned wisdom of the human condition:
The more we suffer, intelligently, the deeper our life. Buddha said that life is suffering, and taught us how to avoid both. This was wrong. Deep suffering is deep life... Nirvana is often taken as a condition of supreme joy. But it is also that of supreme sadness. The point anyway is not the joy or sadness, but the supremeness.