Becker

"Zen provides the ultimate in lightly-resting armor: for the price of maintaining a silence infused with intensity, one avoids having to expose his intellect to threatening critical scrutiny. The Zen smile has many uses, not the least of which is to mask a shallow understanding. As a partial explanation for the quick sympathy for Zen meaninglessness, the idea has occurred to me that the word "Zen" itself is responsible for some of this attraction. To an animal jerked by invisible threads of symbolism and sound (one is inevitably reminded of Helen Keller's sensuous frolic with the newly-discovered word "water") the "What's in a name?" precept is overly general. To ears accustomed to English, "Zen" is a lovely word crisp yet musical. One wonders how appealing Zen would be to the young artist or poet if this badge of tradition bore, say, the Mahayana word, "Kalacakra." But Zen is not merely a lovely sound, or a harmless plaything for poets: it is a serious reform method with an uncompromising belief in the ultimate good of its world view. For an understanding of the workings of this method, we can profitably re-examine the more subtle psychological processes of psychotherapeutic personality change, and the kinship of both these systems to out rightly coercive thought reform. The West has given us psychotherapy; the East, Zen and thought reform. The urge for a world-wide approach to problem solving makes it all the more imperative to assess these three approaches in one work.''

Becker