Preface by Richard Lang to Zen Experience, A Western Approach, by Douglas Harding

On Having No Head by Douglas Harding was published by the London Buddhist Society in 1961. It was subtitled ‘a contribution to Zen in the West’. In the ‘Publisher’s Foreword’ the reader was informed that: “This booklet contains a brief account of a remarkable Zen experience. Now that there is much talk of Zen for the West, it is important as the record of an experience in the mind of a man who at the time had no knowledge of Zen Buddhism. Only in his search for an explanation did he stumble into this field, and find what he needed. These chapters will in due course form part of a larger book called Zen Experience, a Western view, or some such title, but in our opinion they should be made available to all interested with the least possible delay.” That larger book was never published. However, after Harding died (2007) I found amongst his papers the chapters that form this ‘booklet’. Though Harding intended them to follow on from the first three chapters of the original On Having No Head, they make sense without necessarily being attached to that work. We are happy to make them now available.

Harding understood Zen. He understood Zen because he enjoyed, firsthand, the central experience of Zen — the direct seeing of Who we really are. He knew Zen from the inside. Harding was also inspired by Zen. “What I then found in Zen was the fruit and crown of all my past spiritual life — confirmation, tremendous encouragement, and many new perspectives opening out. It was a real home-coming. The absorbing and joyful work of self-discovery — culminating in seeing What I actually was — which had dominated all my adult life, was suddenly given fresh point and put in a much wider frame. From then on, a new openness and satisfaction supervened.”

A relationship flows both ways. Though Harding gained from his meeting with Zen, Zen gained from its encounter with Harding, for Harding then presented the essential experience of Zen in a way that made it accessible to Westerners, or indeed to anyone. He demystified Zen. I accompanied Harding to America in 1974. In New York he gave a talk to a Buddhist group. A man in the audience asked Harding about the meaning of a particular Zen question or koan. The koan was: ‘How do you swallow the west river in one gulp?’ Without missing a beat Harding replied that, though there wasn’t a west river nearby, the East River was just up the road. If the man were to stand by it looking upstream then he would see the river flowing into him — into his limitless ‘single eye’ or ‘mouth’. Harding avoided what could have been an inconclusive discussion by inviting the man to experience, for himself, ‘swallowing’ the river. And it wouldn’t even give him indigestion!

Reading these chapters you will discover plenty about Zen. Harding knew his subject. But the main subject of the book is not Zen. It is you. Who you really are. In another version of his Introduction (not the one published here) Harding wrote: “…true Zen cares nothing about Zen, but only about direct seeing into our own nature. What makes for that end, here and now, is Zen, even if it never met that word; what does not, is not our Zen, even if every T’ang master said it.” As Harding used to say: Before seeing Who you are, you read the scriptures to see if you have got it right. After seeing Who you are, you read the scriptures to see if they have got it right!

In the early 1970s Harding developed his experiments––awareness exercises which guide our attention to our True Nature. Harding’s experiments, his ‘skilful means’, are important because they actually ‘transmit the Light’. They make available the experience of our True Nature. One of the experiments involves you pointing at where others see your face and observing what you see there. Or rather, what you see here. Original! Unconventional! Straight to the point! “A special transmission outside the Scriptures.” I think Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch, (who was adamant that people should SEE their Original Face rather than just think about it) would have appreciated Harding’s skill, his ability to show people where their True Nature is — where it is physically — so that they can enjoy it whenever they wish.