[In the following essay, the Goldsteins argue that J. D. Salinger's writings illustrate the Zen theme of effacing and surmounting boundaries between the self and the other as a means of achieving spiritual enlightenment.]

While it is true that Zen has become a glittering catch-word as connotative as existentialism and at times as meaningless, the fact remains that Zen does exist and that Salinger has shown a definite partiality towards it. Since Zen recognizes that all boundaries are artificial, Salinger's Western experience is not outside the universe Zen encompasses. The importance of the present moment; the long search and struggle in which reason, logic, cleverness, and intellect prove ineffectual; the inadequacy of judgment and criticism which reinforce and stimulate the artificial boundary between self and other; and some degree of enlightenment which results from the non-rational and spontaneous blending of dualities, an enlightenment which permits experience that is complete and unadulterated and makes the moment and, in effect, life non-phoney—all these aspects of Zen can be found in Salinger's world.

First, what is Zen and what is the participant in Zen experience? An explanation of the latter may help clarify the former. The main actor in the typical Zen drama is besieged by doubt and desire. He is not at all certain what enlightenment is, but is convinced it exists, wants it, and is willing to struggle for it. Believing enlightenment is remote from him yet intensely desiring it, he pursues it only to find it continually eludes him. This peculiar dilemma results from the fact that he believes the search he is making with all his heart and mind, with all his being and self and ego, is for something that is outside himself. The Zen master, to whom he has gone for guidance to-wards the Way, grants him formal interviews with an abundance of ceremony which are probably intended to make him fully cognizant and thoroughly frightened, so the seeker fails in the exercise of the spontaneous answer to the irrational question, for example, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" When not being questioned by the Zen master, the disciple spends time in the traditional method of sitting, ponders over various koan or puzzles like the above, and does various tasks with a minimum of verbal distraction. He is not permitted any of the temporary satisfactions which give his ego an illusion of satisfaction or well-being. These pursuits are not done merely for the sake of subduing or chastising the ego in an attempt to make it deny itself, but rather to expose the ego itself as an artificial entity whose very searching for enlightenment is spurious.

A number of Zen poems comment on the state of the universe before the disciple began his search: "The mountains were mountains and the rivers were rivers." During the disciple's search the appearance of the natural world changes, but once enlightenment comes, the mountains are again mountains, the rivers rivers. In the same way in the undifferentiated world of early childhood, the separation between self and the outside world is at a minimum. As Philip Kapleau says in his book The Three Pillars of Zen:

But what the student responds to most keenly is the visible evidence of the roshi's [Venerable Teacher's] liberated mind: his childlike spontaneity and simplicity, his radiance and compassion, his complete identification with his (the student's) aspiration. A novice who watches his seventy-eight-year-old roshi demonstrate a koan with dazzling swiftness and total involvement, and who observes the flowing, effortless grace with which he relates himself to any situation and to all individuals, knows that he is seeing one of the finest products of a unique system of mind and character development, and he is bound to say to himself in his moments of despair: "If through the practice of Zen I can learn to experience life with the same immediacy and awareness, no price will be too high to pay."

Yet for the uninitiated, with the learning of abstractions (language itself being the foremost), self and other are progressively differentiated. Zen's peculiar problem is to bring the self back into a kind of controlled state of infantile non-separation through which it can recognize the arbitrary nature of all the artificial boundaries set up by abstraction and can see the unity in all experience and the existence of ego within that unity. The student seeking enlightenment, therefore, must proceed through his long search and struggle in which reason, logic, cleverness, and intellect prove useless; he must recognize that judgment and criticism reinforce and stimulate the artificial boundary lines of the ego. Finally in the non-rational blending of spurious dualities, he may acquire some degree of enlightenment which will enable him to fully participate in every moment of his day-to-day life. The Zen Master Yasutani-Roshi recites to one of his students the following lines from a famous master: '"When I heard the temple bell ring, suddenly there was no bell and no I, just sound.' In other words, he no longer was aware of a distinction between himself, the bell, the sound, and the universe."

We feel Salinger's main aim is to have his Glass children achieve the liberated moment, that is, experiences fully lived in which there is no separation between self and other. The major conflict in Franny, Zooey, and Buddy concerns the way to achieve this liberated state. Their Zen master is the dead Seymour. The concentrated area in which they will be permitted to act fully, freely, spontaneously, is their chosen métier.

In the same way that a camel will find it easier to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to find his way into heaven, the Glass children have immense barriers that make enlightenment difficult for them, the major being their richly endowed personalities. They are a remarkable breed. Exceptionally bright, they have been raised under the tutelage of Eastern philosophy, but they are equally attune to the external gaiety and tinsel glitter of vaudeville. Thus each member of the Glass family is extroverted yet contemplative, subjectively inclined. The knowledge of languages by certain members of the family (for example, Greek, Latin, Chinese, Japanese, German), the ease with which they sail through ordinary academic pursuits and concentrate on the extraordinary, their wide reading, their use of allusion, their remarkable performance on "It's a Wise Child," all these make the Glass children unique.

Their uniqueness, however, is their Achilles' heel, their burden in the search for enlightenment. Their remarkable endowments hinder them from reaching the pure state of the simple Russian peasant in the pea-green book Franny is so tormented by. In one sense, the Russian peasant is to be envied for his lack of sophistication. Franny, Zooey, and Buddy are all very worldly, all very garrulous, all very academically inclined, all abundantly endowed intellectually and emotionally. Their very genius is their burden, their barrier toward the Way, but they know they must strive for it, for in their midst Seymour, despite his suicide, stands as the enviable sibling, the seer, guru, poet, master. We are given the impression in Franny and Zooey that the enlightenment of the Russian peasant is something out of another time and place when enlightenment was more easily come by than in the twentieth century. Zooey tells Franny that she is not the simple Russian peasant, and earlier Franny had told Lane she wished she had the courage to be a nobody, but she is driven to desire applause, praise, fame, which are, in effect, the results of doing, not the doing itself. In the same way, Buddy, the teacher-writer, wants his stories in print and the praise of his family rather than the doing itself or the teaching itself.

Since Franny, Zooey, and Buddy all desire to reach the state that Seymour had attained, their problem is how to achieve it. What is to be their process toward enlightenment? Salinger, we feel, has in mind a verbal, highly speeded-up version of Zen enlightenment as he conceives it. To take the final step first: the wisdom eventually attained by Franny, Zooey, and Buddy is the wisdom of merging opposites, that is, the cancelling out of supposed opposites, events, objects, ideas, states of feeling, persons, for all dualities are merely arbitrarily drawn lines. Philip Kapleau's comment on Zen koan is pertinent here:

The Chinese Zen masters, those spiritual geniuses who created these paradoxical dialogues, did not hesitate to thumb their noses at logic and common sense in their marvelous creations. By wheedling the intellect into attempting solutions impossible for it, koans reveal to us the inherent limitations of the logical mind as an instrument for realizing ultimate Truth. In the process they pry us loose from our tightly held dogmas and prejudices, strip us of our penchant for discriminating good from bad, and empty us of the false notion of self-and-other, to the end that we may one day perceive that the world of Perfection is in fact no different from that in which we eat and excrete, laugh and weep.

And as the Zen Master Yasutani-Roshi comments to his student:

Your mind can be compared to a mirror, which reflects everything that appears before it. From the time you begin to think, to feel, and to exert your will, shadows are cast upon your mind which distort its reflections. This condition we call delusion, which is the fundamental sickness of human beings. The most serious effect of this sickness is that it creates a sense of duality, in consequence of which you postulate "I" and "notI." The truth is that everything is One, and this of course is not a numerical one. Falsely seeing oneself confronted by a world of separate existences, this is what creates antagonism, greed, and, inevitably, suffering. The purpose of Zazen is to wipe away from the mind these shadows or defilements so that we can intimately experience our solidarity with all life. Love and compassion then naturally and spontaneously flow forth.

In Zooey, to cite one example of the blending of supposed dualities, Buddy's impetus for finally writing a crucial letter to his brother Zooey comes from meeting a small girl at a supermarket meatcounter. When Buddy asks her the names of her boy friends, she replies Dorothy and Bobby. For Buddy the moment becomes a remarkable one, almost an epiphany. At first sight the reader may not be aware of its significance, but when examined in the light of other events, it can clearly be seen that Salinger has intended the child's statement as profound, the blending of one of the most fundamental of dualities, that of sex.

The girl's statement then reminds Buddy of a haiku Seymour composed on a desk blotter of the hotel where he committed suicide. The haiku is about a girl on an airplane as she turns her doll's head around to look at someone, presumably the poet. Once again the dualities of the so-called real and unreal are resolved. The girl and doll are blended, and both the action of the turning and looking become one and the same in time.

Both of these events, the meatcounter episode and the haiku poem, Buddy recognizes as extremely startling and provoke him to his long-intended letter to Zooey. The result of the letter is to give Zooey the way, for the letter contains advice, originally derived from Seymour, concerning what Zooey and, by extension, Buddy and Franny, are to do in this world. Buddy's advice (really Seymour's) is that Zooey should act with all his might. That is his vocation, his mission, his life hood. Zooey recognizes the wisdom of the Seymour-Buddy statement and selects acting rather than some other career he had been contemplating up to that time.

The advice given by Buddy to Zooey is again repeated in the advice given by Zooey to his younger sister Franny. Franny's search, according to Zooey, is the kind of search he himself had pursued with little success not too long ago. He suggests that he too had the inclination to follow the way of the Russian pilgrim, but that way was not for him. Zooey tells his sister he will not remove himself from Western experience—that is, he refuses to go Eastward to find what he is looking for. He is determined to stay right where he is. He has no desire to do a motion picture in France even though he thinks the picture may be good. He wants to stay in New York where he was born, where he was run over twice. The key point is that he has chosen acting over another career he has thought seriously about, namely a Ph.D. in Greek or math that would inevitably have led to Academia. The fact that Zooey does choose acting over more theoretical or academic work seems to indicate a need for action. That is, he chooses to act rather than to speculate or contemplate. Thus, Zooey has rejected Franny's method in two ways: he has rejected contemplation, theory, speculation, and academic pursuit in favor of acting in the world; on the other hand, he has rejected going Eastward into any other culture or any other point of experience removed from where he is at the present moment. Franny is still searching outside herself, a fruitless pursuit since enlightenment is always within the self. In more concrete terms: no pea-green book will bring enlightenment; no solving of a koan or intellectual exercise will guarantee the Way; no self-conscious utterance of prayer will advance one toward the higher truth of self.

The advice Zooey gives to Franny is the same Buddy gave to him: act with all your might, for God if you must, but act. The meaning here is not simply the point of Franny's being a good actress, but that Franny, like Zooey himself, must express action to live. Hers is not to be a contemplative existence either, not something removed Eastward in the recital of a prayer that has no special meaning for her or that she misinterprets, confusing, Zooey says, Christ with Heidi's grandfather and Saint Francis. The path toward her salvation is directly in front of her, where she is, within, here. Here is where Franny chose to have her nervous breakdown—right at home. And it is right at home that Franny is going to find salvation. Even the homemade chicken soup is consecrated. We feel Salinger's meaning of home is broader than simply the connotative associations of the family abode. It is home within the heart, within the self. It has merely been temporarily lost and needs only to be recaptured.

It is Franny, Buddy, and Zooey's struggle to recapture the state of enlightenment each has temporarily lost. A close examination of Franny's problem will serve to illustrate the same kind of struggle in Buddy and Zooey.

Franny finally becomes somewhat enlightened upon hearing Zooey's advice about acting. To act with all her might is her task in life. And it is her task to act for God, to act as if she were not acting, to act so fully that no point of separation exists between what she is doing and any other conception of herself. Franny's struggle throughout Franny is her burdensome ego. Her dilemma is unquestionably the condition of her ego, and unquestionably the burden of the living Glass children is the same. Their trouble is too much ego, which leads us back to the first point we made about their wonderful potential, their magnificent endowments.

Franny is besieged, bedeviled, by the urge to complain, to criticize, to reject, to disapprove. She judges everyone around her, and she judges herself as well (the Glass children are all highly self-critical). She knows she has too much ego. She knows she is overly critical, but she cannot do anything about it. That is, the more she recognizes how critical she is, the more critical she becomes. For a while she may suppress her critical tendencies, but before long these crop up again. She promises Lane that she will stop being destructive, but in the next breath she is again criticizing Lane or something else, someone else. She cannot help herself because she is trying to solve her dilemma through repression, which always implies an opposite. Repression lasts only so long; then the ego re-asserts itself with its powerful tendency to judge. Franny is, consequently, separated from all other objects and people around her, including her siblings. She criticizes abundantly people in the educational system, roommates, poets, the main actor in The Playboy of the Western World, her coworkers in summer stock, the Wally Campbells of the universe, Lane. She has a personal criticism to make about modern poetry, modern education, modern critics, American tourists, "section men." She has in fact a whole universe of complaint. She has set herself apart and from her high pedestal looks down like some stern lawgiver. She does see herself as one of the phonies, but her way is the way of repression so that the critical faculty is continually functioning.

Her enlightenment comes through Zooey's verbal barrage of identity, identity with self and with the part she is acting, the capacity, in short, to act as if she had no self. And her final point of identity derives ultimately from Seymour's advice that everybody is the Fat Lady. The Glass children, exceptional as they may be, are not exempted. Everybody is the Fat Lady. This image of the Fat Lady is not merely an effusion of love. Salinger is saying something a good deal more explicit than love-thy-neighbor. The major point, we believe, is that Salinger wishes to tell us there is no difference between Franny and the Fat Lady, impossible as that is to imagine. Franny and this cancerous Fat Lady with veiny legs rocking in a chair on some unidentified porch—the exceptional Franny and the unpleasant associations of this Fat Lady—are not separate. They are exactly part of the same thing.

Zooey, who gives this advice as Zooey, and who up to this time has been Buddy's spokesman or Buddy himself, has at last succeeded in identifying with Seymour, has in fact become Buddy-Seymour-Zooey. When he is finally recognized by Franny to be Zooey and not Buddy, he gives her the advice about the Fat Lady. We imagine that Salinger at this point intends to have us see Zooey as enlightened by his spontaneous advice, advice communicated to Franny without any separation between them.

The struggle portrayed in Franny and Zooey and even in Seymour is the same. The essential element in this trilogy is the breaking down of barriers between supposed opposites, artificial barriers created by abstracting and intellectualizing human beings. When the barriers are removed, enlightenment is produced in the form of some positive act. The stories move from conflict toward enlightenment, the conflict centered on the self-contained ego removed from others and other events. That self-contained separate ego leads to actions Salinger recognizes as phoney—that is, actions removed from the experience by judging the experience, criticizing it, dissecting it. Others are removed from the self, and the self is traditionally reenforced as a separate entity continually removed, separated, isolated. Conflict and turmoil, judgment and criticism, all these support a separated ego which Franny in particular and to a lesser extent Zooey and finally Buddy (in Seymour) must overcome before they reach some kind of awareness we have called "enlightenment."

It is this removal of self from other that we feel is Salinger's main criticism of the phoney. The three Glass children, far from being part of a cult of self-love, are in a very real sense double-phonies. What places them in a special category of the "phoney class" is the fact that they themselves are aware that they are phonies. Yet in spite of their awareness, of their self-criticism, this awareness does not make them non-phonies. They do not become non-phonies until they reach the critical moment in which they resolve artificial dualities. They are phonies with a difference, though, because they are conscious of their spurious participation in events. Other characters in Salinger's stories are phonies without being aware that they are, such as the famous musician in Seymour who complains to the principal about his daughter's music teacher offering "pop" rather than "good, healthy" classical music. Having received a favorable reply from the principal, the father's ego immensely bolstered, he struts home whistling "K-K-K-Katie." But Franny and Buddy and Zooey are double-snarled, for they are phonies aware of their phoniness. That is, they are consciously aware of what they are doing but cannot help doing what they do. Or else they make a remarkable attempt at repression, as in Franny's case, but as we have seen, repression will out. Their awareness of this weakness is another reason why Salinger endowed them so spectacularly so that they would become aware phonies who could search with all their conscious being for something other than what they are.

The phonies in Salinger's world are removed from immediate experience. The eventually partially enlightened Glass trio of Franny, Zooey, and Buddy become enlightened when they cease to isolate themselves as separate egos and so merge with experience that there is not a hair's breadth between will and action. Salinger focuses on the world of immediacy, the here and now, the immersion in the moment, to reintensify his theme of enlightenment which allows full participation in events. What has been called Salinger's verbal diarrhea is exactly this attempt to make concrete everything in sight so that the reader is immersed, say, in the middle of a bathtub or is staring into a medicine cabinet. The wealth of Salinger's descriptive detail helps make the moment concrete. The reader is immersed in the here and now of an event, the character acting in some concrete moment in time.

Salinger is often dating things for us, and Salinger-Buddy bemoans the fact that some writers never tell us what the time is. Buddy gives us the hour and me date and tries to break down the barrier between author and reader. Certainly Salinger's increasingly personal use of first-person narrative gains the added impact of immediacy. Concreteness, the feeling of immediacy, the emphatic immersion in the here and now, the breaking down of barriers between writer and reader by the intimate medium of a character (Buddy or Zooey) who is of course the writer rather than merely the character, all these give us a technical version of a simulated, very immediate experience that we may call part of Salinger's Zen.

Not only do these techniques suggest Salinger's awareness of Zen. He also uses other more direct or allusive Zen references in his stories. The incident of the curbside marbles in Seymour is one of the most profound. Salinger undoubtedly derived the inspiration for this scene from Eugene Herrigel's illuminating book Zen in the Art of Archery since the comment Seymour makes about marbles is about the same Herrigel makes on archery. Buddy, who was shooting at the marbles, was, according to his brother Seymour, aiming at them, and because he was aiming with the purpose of hitting another marble or marbles, he was delighted when he succeeded and disappointed when he failed. By being disappointed or delighted with the result of the shot, Buddy, according to Seymour, is indicating the possibility of losing. Here again the desire to win or the fact of winning in itself always brings into play the possibility of losing. The final growth of Buddy in Seymour comes when he recognizes the wisdom of his Zen-Master brother. The duality involved in playing marbles is winning and losing, and the state of the self under such conditions, a self that is striving to win, is a troubled self. Buddy has continually told us in Seymour that he visualizes everything he writes in eleven-point type. In other words, lines published on a page and success as we imagine it have been to Buddy what he considered important—the result above and beyond the act. The separation of the self which strives after something, in this instance publication and success, the foolishness of such striving, and the non-separated self which does not strive but "writes with all his stars out" is the wisdom Buddy attains from Seymour's advice recalled almost thirty years after the event. What Buddy learns is that he moves from one bit of holy ground to the next, that the act of writing is what is essential, that immersion in one's creation is what is crucial. He can now enter Room 307 of his English composition class with the recognition that it too is holy and that even the terrible "Miss Zabel" is as much his sister as Franny.

That Salinger has had Zen on his mind for a considerable period of time can be illustrated by The Catcher in the Rye, the germ of the enlightened or to-be-partially enlightened Glass children present there. We find Holden wandering through a lost week-end in which he himself belongs with the phonies. He proceeds from experience to experience, searching for something but always ending up with phonies of one kind or another. At the end of the story, however, Holden, who has had a nervous break-down (as Franny has) and is being treated in a psychiatric institution, comes to some kind of awareness, namely that he misses all of the "phonies." Holden finally identifies in some way with the people he has spent so much time criticizing, but always criticizing with some degree of sympathy. He is not going to wander off to the West as a blind man or hobo, nor is he going to follow any of the other romantic visions he has toyed with during the course of the novel. Ultimately he is headed toward home. That, of course, is where he does go when he meets his sister Phoebe, and it is Phoebe and the very concrete image of her in her blue coat on a carrousel that ultimately brings Holden to the awareness that he has to go home. The final words in the novel seem to portend the major theme of the Glass stories. A psychiatrist mistakenly asks Holden what he is going to do in September. Holden says he does not know. How should he know what he is going to be doing at such a removed time as next September? Holden seems to imply that he knows what he is doing only at the exact moment he is doing it, not at some point in some arbitrarily designated future.

Holden foreshadows in a much less explicit way the highly critical Glasses, for he too is very clever, very judgmental, very witty, always striving for something. As Salinger proceeds and matures in his career as a writer, what he suggests Holden was searching for becomes more explicit in the Glass stories. Not only is Holden the Catcher in the Rye, as he explicitly tells us—the catcher who catches children before they fall from the field of rye—but Holden too is caught. He is caught in a way quite similar to Buddy's being caught, and that is by the image of love for a dead brother. Holden's brother Allie is intended to be the wise, sagacious Seymour-type. When Holden needs help, he turns to his dead brother Allie. Holden is caught by love and an awareness of something better in the universe, and he is similarly caught by his younger sister Phoebe when she tells him there is nothing in the world he likes. The stress once more is that Holden is far too critical, his critical tendencies similar to those of the Glass trio of Franny, Buddy, and Zooey. Holden's recognition that he has separated himself from all the people he has been defining as phonies comes in his awareness that he misses all of them.

It is this overly critical tendency in Salinger's characters that we want to stress as a key point in Salinger's Zen, and that tendency to be overly critical says something profound about our modern American life, this very critical time of our own very critical people.

In modern America, various institutions (educational, literary, social, scientific) which at one time or another were regarded as sacred are now no longer seen in that light, but as simply the conscious expression of people in the process of culture-building, society-building. The social sciences have been both a cause and an effect of this recognition. In our highly conscious age, we realize that even God is not beyond the pale of criticism. All of our institutions are now recognized as man-made systems that can be changed, bettered, even made worse. Once the sacred quality of all institutions has been removed, the only thing left is the individual or individuals who make up institutions. But of course even the self has not been untampered with, for psychoanalysis has been busily revising and remodeling it for almost a hundred years.

All institutions and all aspects of culture, therefore, are ultimately derived from human power, but at the same time the forces in the universe which man cannot control seem to grow larger. That is, we recognize that we build political institutions and we build God and we also build atom bombs. On the one hand, the self is endowed with enormous creative power; on the other, the same self is acted upon by even greater powers that make it seem, on the contrary, less powerful than ever before.

From the viewpoint of social critics in the twentieth century, the existing self is a split self, a disconnected self, a separated self, an atomized self—exceedingly powerful as it continues to create, yet acted upon and weakened by the very things it has created. What this cultural determinism means is that various aspects of the culture act upon the self, but ultimately of course these cultural forces that act upon the self are recognized as created by that very self. What results is that gradually, year by year, decade by decade, the area of greater consciousness of self is expanded. Our consciousness has moved from the realm of the divine and the sacred to various aspects of culture or social systems into a very minute consciousness of self. In our atomized world of self and selves, only this component of consciousness remains. That is, every year another system or aspect of the cultural world around us comes into our conscious recognition as having been created by us. We no longer worship, study, create, with the same abandon and spontaneity we once did. Instead, we analyze, dissect, find differences, multiply dichotomies. As a result, all of our increased consciousness becomes endowed to a self that ultimately, after all our critical perspective, stands alone as a unit and decides consciously or self-consciously what it is to do, worship, think, feel, speak. Left with this overabundance of conscious-self, we begin to wonder if we are not at the brink of helplessness.

It is with this overburdened, self-consciously conscious self that Salinger begins his quest. The highly endowed, overburdened, critically conscious Glass children are representative of our time in history. The spectacular Franny and Buddy and Zooey are fully endowed and fully aware and fully self-conscious and quite unhappy. Their self-consciousness is their burden, and they seek to rid themselves of it and to blend it into something else. Salinger's three Glasses manage to attain in their own fashion some freedom from this burdensome self, this critical self, this highly self-conscious self. The solution is the blending of self and other, the removal of abstraction and analysis, the avoidance of criticism, the absorption in the moment.

The most unusual aspect of Salinger's liberated Glasses is that change comes by way of a verbal flow of abstraction. This may be a contradiction-in-terms, for to experience the liberation of Zen by a second-hand conscious verbal overflow is not the usual way of deriving enlightenment. But in Salinger's highly self-conscious world, this is the means by which his characters attain a twentieth century American form of enlightenment. In this enlightened state the Glass children become freed of their critical tendencies, become freed of their highly separate selves, become one with the Fat Lady or the Christ in each that makes for universal empathy. Perhaps Salinger is the keenest social critic of our time. He has, we feel, focused on a major problem in the modem world, on the last stronghold of the sacred, for an atomized self is disastrous.