[In the following essay, Doherty focuses on several elements of Zen teaching—including the dissolution of antinomies and the violent shock of spiritual enlightenment—in the poetry of W. B. Yeats.]

Yeats's fascination with Japan and its culture had its origins in his study of the Noh drama under the auspices of Ezra Pound during the winter of 1913-14. Thereafter, references to the "noble plays" of Japan and to Japanese art float casually into his essays, often to highlight some contrast between such plays and the Western predilection for social realism and the intimate personal mode of the theater. From 1927 onwards, however, there is a distinct shift of emphasis; the range of reference widens to include appreciative comments on Zen Buddhism both as a method of meditation and as a dynamic approach to art and life. The source of this new enthusiasm was clearly the first volume of Daisetz Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism, which Yeats read shortly after its publication in 1927, and praised as "an admirable and exciting book." Much of the material of the Essays appeared simultaneously in the Japanese philosophical journal The Eastem Buddhist, edited by Suzuki himself, copies of which Yeats received regularly. There also Yeats could have read the first translation into English, made by Suzuki, of a text which contains almost all the fundamental tenets of Zen Buddhist teaching, The Lankavatara Sutra.

Yeats was much taken not only by the Zen methods of meditation but also by its mondos, those abrupt dramatic dialogues between Zen master and disciple. These exchanges vividly portrayed the moment of "enlightenment" (Satori) which seemed often to have been precipitated by harsh or even combative encounters. Legends of the Zen monks and their sudden "enlightenment" form part of that remarkable patchwork of meditative reverie and tough comment which goes to make up the substance of the later Yeats essays. The legends themselves are evoked with a deliberate informality and in a number of fairly predictable contexts where the contrast between Eastern and Western modes and attitudes requires it.

Yeats's fine attunement to Zen and his acute penetration to the core of its significance are indeed impressive (this was in sharp contrast to most of his own contemporaries, students of the Japanese scene, who instinctively slotted Zen into a Neoplatonic framework, or who, like Sir George Sansom, mistook it for a cult of "eternal tranquillity," and whom Suzuki had occasion to castigate). Yeats immediately intuited that Zen was not still another manifestation of a religious idealism coupled to a contemptus mundi, but a radical vindication of the world in concreto. He was also attracted by its rejection of all abstract and systematic formulations in favor of a vital apprehension, life crystallized in a single gesture or action. All of this came as a powerful counterweight to the perpetual lure of the abstract, "the sun-dried skeletons of birds" as he once called it, which haunted his imagination and caused him to turn back "in terror" to the incarnate world and to the beauty of human embodiment. In this sense Zen reinforced the concrete pole of the Yeatsian dialectic. But it was also the portent of a more ultimate hope, that of exploding all antinomies in a sudden and final precipitation of insight, the hope that underscores his own koan-like deathbed comment, "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it." It was an embodiment which he anticipated might be as simple as a glance or a touch.

In this article I should like to explore those aspects of Zen which Yeats appropriated from Suzuki, and more especially Zen's confirmation of that drive towards extreme simplicity and of those electrifying intimations of unified being which characterize the later poems. Much of their violence, barely contained, their rhetorical intensity and gnomic utterance, their aura of frustrated questing, have immediate parallels in Suzuki's presentation of his approaches to Satori. We can examine the more general parallels and convergencies first of all.

At its simplest, Suzuki's designation of those qualities of mind most congenial to the flowering of Zen as "aloofness, romanticism, a certain practical temperament" would have attracted Yeats as a flattering mirror-image of his own disposition. Its rather elitist pretensions as well as its suitability only for those consumed with an exalted energy and purpose, as Suzuki presents it, would have served to intensify the attraction. More specifically, his delineation of Zen as an heroic and neo-Nietzschean drama of the will, of the kind of "indomitable will" which the Buddha exemplified, matched one of the more habitual masks of Yeats's later years. Suzuki's Buddha beat upon the wall of truth, then penetrated to the "very basis of creation," the "original abode," and finally proclaimed the wisdom of resolved conflict. Likewise Yeats's "eagle mind" with its protean range of voices aspires to master the ultimate source through the assaults of an exultant energy. As a corollary, Suzuki's emphasis on Zen self-power, the radical "reconstruction of one's entire personality" through one's own efforts, corresponds to the ambitious master-plan and labor of Yeats's old age. Both the Zen and the Yeastian drive is towards an exalted freedom beyond the antinomies of the personal self, towards the transformation of anxiety into celebratory joy. For Zen, this achievement is through the attainment of Satori, for Yeats through the expansion power of art to dissolve the boundaries of good and evil, the transvaluation of values through the pure inner act of the agent.

These are suggestions of a convergence of drive and purpose. The challenge of Zen, however, was to Yeats's lifelong predilection for conflict as the generator of energy. As Suzuki expansively records it, the path to Satori was mined with doubt and internal division, but its attainment marked the dissolution of all dualisms, the cessation of conflict. Yeats was fascinated by Zen's claim to go beyond what seemed to him perhaps the ultimate and irresolvable dualism, that of "the One and the Self with reality" as portrayed in the Upanishads and in Patanjali's Aphorisms of Yoga. This occurred in a triumphant act of enlightenment in which all such conventional opposites as spirit/matter, sacred/profane, God/creature were resolved and transcended. The consequence was a luminous expansion of the senses in a new coalescence of energies, and the abrupt disclosure of a restored universe in the irruption of supreme joy. This, Zen held out, not as a future attainment or a postponed reward, but as a now-possibility. This was the challenge and the promise for Yeats. Yet the Last Poems along with the essays and letters reveal an old man, dedicated to combat and confrontation, deliberately provoking them as a catalyst for the making of poems. Thus each act of creation is, at best, a little Satori, a miniature trial of the "unity of being," after which the poet relapses into an excited anticipation of fresh rants and rages. In the context of the poetry, the fascination of Zen for Yeats was primarily in its methods, its precipitation of Satori often by sudden shock or violence, that flash of apparent "madness," without which, Suzuki hints, "no great work has ever been accomplished." The parallel with Yeats's own mode of creation is striking, that act of incandescent intensity which completes the "partial mind," after which the poet (unlike the Zen saint who remains permanently whole) fragments into "the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast."

The details of Yeats's appropriation of Zen teaching reveal at once how selective he was, how exclusively indebted to Suzuki, and ultimately how compelled he was by the exigencies of his own quest. Perhaps the single most significant point of attraction for Yeats to Zen was Suzuki's insistence on Zen's "radical empiricism," the apprehension of the world in the state of Satori as pulsating and energized matter. This involves no less than the "enlargement of the senses" (Yeats's own phrase) in a vitalized extension of seeing. Suzuki characterizes this "empiricism" in a variety of ways: as the celebration of the "concrete and tangible," as salvation through the finite since "there is nothing infinite apart from finite things," as the living of life in concreto beyond "concepts" or "images," and as the attunement of the "work of creation" without the corresponding urge to interview the creator. Here the resonances with Yeats's own final philosophical stance, the romantic and passionate empiricism of his old age, are consistent and close. At its simplest, he declares that "the concrete alone is loved." Thus, as he conceives it, the drama of his last years must revolve on the "struggle to exalt and overcome concrete realities perceived not with mind only but as with the roots of my hair." It was an orientation which, he felt, had been lost to the Western world, but which was still vibrant in Japan. There, he suggests, men still feel the "keen delight in what we have." He discovered an identical orientation in the luminaries of his Irish pantheon, in the Berkeley of the Commonplace Book, in the Gold-smith who wrote The Deserted Village, in the Burke who savaged "mathematical democracy," and in its newly discovered carriers, the Zen masters of Japan. It was Berkeley, he declares, who envisaged a philosophy so concrete that it would be accessible to all, the revelation of "a world like that of a Zen priest in Japan or in China." It was Berkeley too who, amid the bland indifference of his contemporaries, "was fumbling his way backward to some simple age," an age which already had come to fulfillment in the contemplative activity of the Zen monk and in the "powerful rhythm" of the Zen painter. Most revealing of all is Yeats's identification of Berkeley's "restored world" with that of one of Suzuki's Zen masters who saw the world in a new way "when his mental eye was first opened":

Descartes, Locke, and Newton took away the world and gave us its excrement instead. Berkeley restored the world. I think of the Nirvana Song of the Japanese monk: 'I sit on the mountain side and look up at the little farm—I say to the old farmer: "How many times have you mortgaged your land and paid off the mortgage?" I take pleasure in the sound of the reeds.'

How closely this "radical empiricism" and the restored physicality of the world were associated in Yeats's mind with Zen teaching may be seen by examining one of the short sections of A Vision. There in a well-known passage he first of all affirms that all conflict must be ultimately resolved in the revelation of a world which is "concrete, sensuous, bodily," the basic biological cycle of energy whose model is "the living bird… (that) signifies truth when it eats, evacuates, builds its nest …" He immediately reinforces his point by recalling four Zen anecdotes borrowed directly from Suzuki's Essays, all of which highlight one or other aspect of Zen "empiricism." The first repeats the "Nirvana Song" of the monk (quoted above); the second portrays a young man who celebrates his attainment of Satori with friends and "flute-players"; the third offers a vivid demonstration of Zen's "empirical" methods; and the fourth symbolizes both the suddenness and the radiance of this new mode of perception. The passage, which is rarely quoted, is as follows:

"No more does the young man come from behind the embroidered curtain amid the sweet clouds of incense; he goes among his friends, he goes among the flute-players; something very nice has happened to the young man, but he can only tell it to his sweetheart." "You ask me what is my religion and I hit you upon the mouth." "Ah! Ah! The lightning crosses the heavens, it passes from end to end of the heavens. Ah! Ah!"

This drive towards a radical empiricism surges through the later poetry, ambiguously rendered, and often with a painful intensity. Paradoxically, however, there the concrete world seldom manifests itself in its "shining and sounding," the envied "suchness" of things which was the domain of the Zen masters. Rather from "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" onwards, the concrete is marked down as the extreme antithesis to the state of enlightenment, as a physical embrace violently inflicted and violently endured. Its sole virtue lies in its possession of the kind of resistance and gall which generate poetry. In "A Dialogue," for example, it has nothing of the elegance and fertility of the biological cycle, incarnate in the "living bird," but emerges instead as an image of revolting fecundity, autochthonic aggression, and fruitless human suffering:

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

Here the concrete is disclosed as the original thrown-ness of existence which must be confronted and purged away with each new incarnation. Throughout the later poems, its keyword is "desolation," whether it be the "desolate source" from which both life and love spring, or the "desolation of reality" which confronts European man (by contrast to the Mount Meru hermits who are contemplatively attuned to ice and snow) when his "ravening, raging, and uprooting" of the world have run their course. It is the lot of "The Wild Old Wicked Man," who, rejecting the "lightning stream" which eradicates suffering (the favorite analogue of the Zen masters for Satori), chooses instead a moment of orgasmic oblivion, as brief as it is "second-best":

"That some stream of lightning
From the old man in the skies
Can burn out that suffering
No right-taught man denies.
But a coarse old man am I,
I choose the second-best,
I forget it all awhile
Upon a woman's breast.'

The ultimate instance occurs in "The Circus Animal's Desertion," where in the final stanza, the concrete is disclosed, not in its numinous "suchness," but as the detritus of myth-making, the dejecta membra which the lure of dreams and allegories shut out from view:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

No one knew better than Yeats himself that this was not the "concrete" of Berkeley's aspiration, nor of the Zen masters' attainment. Rather it is the kind of "desolation" which intrudes when the dialectical dream collapses, irretrievably dualistic in form, the gross product of the contradiction between the "painted stage" and the "excrement" of the world which it briefly occludes.

Suzuki consistently stressed the fact that the (Rinzai) Zen route to Satori was never gradual, the result, for example, of the meticulous cleansing of the "soul's mirror" through meditative practice. Satori was, in fact, an abrupt annunciation, the sudden irruption of hitherto unplumbed energies, a translation of the "whole man" into continuous seeing, "Nirvana reached while yet in the flesh." To delineate it, he exploits the traditional range of nature metaphors, the cataclysm, the earthquake, the shattering rocks, the lightning flash, to evoke its intensity. The sudden annunciatory flash which electrifies the whole being is the hallmark of Zen, as the mondos which Suzuki records abundantly show. This was an aspect of Zen which lodged in Yeat's memory, and it came as a welcome reinforcement and confirmation of his own aspirations in old age.

As far back as his Golden Dawn days, the metaphorical "lightning flash" had symbolized Yeats's anticipation of a radical access to vision and to ultimate insight. However, it seems that in practice, and as the poetry reveals, these images of transformation "came slowly, there was not that sudden miracle as if the darkness had been cut with a knife." They were types of the hieratic processional figures which appeared to him in trance or in reverie. Zen, by contrast, brought with it the late and revived possibility of the violent precipitation of vision, the lightning strike in the flesh. This, for example, is how Yeats interprets the forehead mark on certain Indian, Chinese, and Japanese images of the Buddha; it is the mark of the "strike," the physical sign of the opening of the "third eye" in the "mind's direct apprehension of the truth, above all antinomies." Similarly his characterization of the Indian mystic, Bhagwan Shri Hamsa's enlightenment bears a striking resemblance to the enlightenment drama and the "indomitable will" of Suzuki's Buddha: "(Shri Hamsa) strained his heroic will to the utmost,… but the Self has brought the event, the supreme drama, out of its freedom, and this revelation, because the work of unlimited power, has been sudden." For Yeats, the Zen masters were to become the exemplars, those who raised the method of sudden precipitation to the level of art. He had almost certainly this in mind when he declared that it seemed to him "of late (1934) that the sense of spiritual reality comes whether to the individual or to crowds from some violent shock." This was the abrupt method of enlightenment which, he declares, he had sought for in vain in "encyclopedias and histories," to come upon it at last in "the Scriptures and the legends of Zen Buddhism." By way of illustrating this escape "from all that intellect holds true" through the technique of the violent precipitation "by shock," he recounts one of the most celebrated of Zen instances, known as "Gutei's one-finger Zen." Yeats's version is as follows:

A young monk said to the Abbot, 'I have noticed that when anybody has asked about Nirwana you merely raise your right hand and lower it again, and now when I am asked I answer in the same way.' The Abbot seized his hand and cut off a finger. The young monk ran away screaming, then stopped and looked back. The abbot raised his hand and lowered it, and at that moment the young monk attained the supreme joy.

The Last Poems themselves are littered with such moments of violent physical annunciation and transmutation. In the apocalyptic theater of "Lapis Lazuli," for example, Hamlet and Lear experience precisely such an abrupt and unheralded irruption of joy. It is this which transforms them from being creatures of contingency, mere puppets of the apocalypse, into ecstatic and enlightened figures in an extreme drama, transcending the universal and "desolate" reality which threatens to engulf them:

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.

In "An Acre of Grass," the old man at last confronts the limits of the dialectical quest. Neither the endless projections of "loose imagination" nor the repetitive grapplings of the mind with the empirical world ("its rag and bone") can precipitate the ultimate truth. The alternative which the poem offers—the beating upon the wall of truth, "the reconstruction of one's entire personality," and "the re-making of life itself in an act of ecstatic enlightenment, whose European exemplars are Timon, Lear, and Blake—is an exact equivalent of the mode of Suzuki's Buddha:

Grant me an old man's frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call.

The most extreme and dubious instance of such radical transmutations occurs in "Under Ben Bulben." There Yeats promotes Suzuki's suggestion of the incidental and occasional "violence" of Zen and its methods to the status of an ontological dogma. Beyond the limits of language, the poem asserts, every man confronts his destiny, transcends all dualisms and attains the ultimate joy and tranquility through an act of violence:

Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.

The shadow of Nietzsche (whom Yeats reread in 1936-37) rather than that of Suzuki falls darkly across these lines.

Of course, such violence was never gratuitous, a crude display of bad temper. Rather it heralded the trauma which initiated the return to the "original home" (Suzuki), the unification of the man with his archetype (Yeats). Suzuki employs a diversity of Zen metaphors (many of them identical with Yeatsian ones) to encompass this attainment of wholeness: it is your own "original face… prior to thy own birth," the unity of dancer and the dance, "pure water poured into pure water," the ultimate act in which actor and action, thinker and thought, the knower and the known are consumed away. Both Yeats and Suzuki agree that these are mere metaphors, shadows of the "formless," imprints of the "deep truth" which is finally "imageless."

The Yeatsian task in old age was to complete his "partial mind," to unite with his own archetype. His earlier enthrallment had been to elaborate symbols and images, often emerging in sleep, and exfoliating into magnificent structures, which threatened to engulf him. Now (1932), he declares, the ultimate source is "always an action, never a system of thought." It is this which sets a man free from "a multitude of opinions" and permits him to attend to "the whole drama of life, simplicities, banalities, intoxications." It is precisely this urge to unknow, to reduce his mind to "a single energy" which tempts him "to go to Japan, China, or India for my philosophy" (Balzac alone among Europeans pulls him back to the comic confusion and mess of humanity).

The sole European artist who embarked on an identical quest for unknowing was Goethe. It was he who made his Faust proclaim that "In the beginning was the Act" rather than the orthodox "In the beginning was the Word." And Yeats applauds Gentile, who found "in those words of Faust a conviction that ultimate reality is the Pure Act, the actor and the thing acted upon, the puncher and the punching-ball, consumed away." Yet, Yeats maintains, Goethe failed. Even he lacked the "science or philosophy" that would have precipitated a "different level of consciousness," and so exchanged the "white heat" of enlightenment for the "cold iron" of opinions and of intellectual knowledge. Indeed Yeats declares that it was precisely because there was "no Zen Buddhism, no Yogi practice, no Neo-Platonic discipline" that Europe lost the power to remake itself, and so sank into the toils of "mechanical science." In the same context, and in a remarkable and idiosyncratic historiography, Yeats fabricates a Europe, already devolved through its earlier periods of absorption in Christian myth and of commitment to rational humanism, but now lacking the dynamics of Yoga or Zen which would rescue it from the shipwreck of absolute science. Viewed in this light, the Last Poems themselves are trials in the explosive dynamics of art, the last urgent effort by the last romantic to transmute the consciousness of Europe through the assaults of a rhetorical intensity which is now within his control.

There is a noticeable shift in the poetry from the earlier tragic endeavor to create symbols of power and permanence in a destructive world, typical of The Tower poems, towards a "joyful" (if sometimes hysterical) drive towards individual wholeness. This strain is already marked in the "Crazy Jane" cycle of poems, those "mad songs" which, as one critic put it, utter "the wisdom of a more radical wholeness than reason, nature, and society combine to permit us." Each short poem pushes towards a single act or gesture, an encounter with the "timeless individuality" shadowed in the sexual archetype, a unity which the dichotomized human lovers struggle to attain. Perhaps the most extreme and memorable version occurs in Poem VI, "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop," where the traditional antinomies of sacred and profane, formal courtship and sexual assault, the romantic and the excremental vision are collapsed and transcended in a single savage "rending" out of which wholeness is realized:

A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'

Other love poems also record this quest for individual wholeness under a variety of metaphorical guises. It is crystallized in the young woman's search for her "original face" in "Before the World was Made." It appears as the "single root" of love in "The Three Bushes," as the whole "substance" of love in the Lady's three songs, each of these poems pushing beyond the traditional antinomies of body and soul towards the experience of an energized matter, radiating a sexual vitality, orgasmic and total.

This drive towards wholeness takes on the status of a personal manifesto in "A Prayer for Old Age," where the mind as ceaseless generator of dualisms is rejected in favor of the "marrow-bone" with its connotation of some indivisible substance or material. As an attainment, however, Yeats reserves it exclusively for his Eastern adepts. Thus, in the poetry, only the hermits of Mount Meru and the Chinese ascetics of "Lapis Lazuli" truly embody this wholeness. In so doing, they appear in stark contrast to European man, perpetually roused to frenzy by the power of the archetype, yet doomed in his attempt to subdue it by obsessive thinking and acting (his "ravening, raging, and uprooting") instead of uniting with it in joy. Thus too, even when such wholeness manifests itself in "The Apparitions" as the essence of that embodied joy which floods the aging Yeats, it functions mainly as a defense against those discarnate terrors which A Vision so harrowingly portrays:

When a man grows old his joy
Grows more deep day after day,
His empty heart is full at length,
But he has need of all that strength
Because of the increasing Night
That opens her mystery and fright.

Of necessity such single-minded questing for unity of being has direct implications for the process of artistic creation itself. In this area, also, a remarkable convergence is evident between the Zen theory of art, as Suzuki presents it, and Yeats's own final convictions. For Yeats, Suzuki's analysis of the act of artistic creation came as another long-sought-after proof of the existence in Japan of a tradition and of a style of art which had foundered in Europe. The Zen artist puts forth "his whole being" in action, and without reserve. In the act of creation he is possessed by the archetype, by "somebody else." Each brush stroke beats with "the pulsation of a living being." Thus the creative act is neither mimetic nor symbolic. For example, the birds the Zen artist paints are birds of "his own creation," as vital in their justified existence as the living creatures. Thus too, Suzuki claims, the gulf between artist and saint dissolves, the man-artist becoming "divinely human… not a manifestation but Reality itself… the very thing." The Zen-man transforms "his life into a work of creation" in exactly the same manner as the sculptor chisels a figure out of "inert matter." Ultimately the creative process involves a radical act of evacuation of all that Yeats calls "passion, ambition, desire or phantasy," and the emergence of that spirit of poverty (wabi), which implicates the work of art in its loneliness and peace, its final sunyata (void-ness). In this sense, the way of the artist is the way of death, the ridding of all that is not attentive to the moment of creation. Thus the fulfillment of art and the bringing of life to its completion in death coincide.

Here was a marvelous reinforcement of Yeats's own intuitions, and soon he wove Suzuki's ideas into the fabric of his final theories about art. In a single paragraph of a late essay, he associates Berkeley's Heaven of "physical pleasure" and Blake's "enlarged and numerous senses" with the Zen monk's Satori triggered by "an odour of unknown flowers," and with the Zen painter who gathers "into the same powerful rhythm all those things that in the work of his predecessor stood so solidly as themselves." The climax of art and that of contemplative activity coincides in the "pure indivisible act" of the whole man. He elaborates such correspondences in another late essay where he discusses Patanjali's Aphorisms of Yoga and the four stages of deep contemplation (Samadhi). The fourth stage is one beyond art where all "objects are lost in complete light"; the third, however, Yeats characterizes as the phase of supernormal sense-perception, where "the man has disappeared as the sculptor in his statue, the musician in his music." And he immediately calls on "the Japanese philosopher" (presumably Suzuki) for confirmation: "One remembers the Japanese philosopher's saying, 'What the artist perceives through a medium, the saint perceives immediately.'" In one of his last letters Yeats indentifies Zen art with "the concordance of achievement and death," that ultimate "poverty" in which the utmost accomplishment in art coincides with the final extinction of the ego. For this reason Zen painters are able to evoke "peace and loneliness by some single object or by a few strokes of the brush."

Yeats also associated this methodological asceticism, this generation of maximum intensity through miminal gesture, with another celebrated aspect of Zen, which Suzuki records. This was the legendary occasion of the transmission of Zen when the Buddha, without speaking, held up a flower to his disciples. Only one of them understood it as the total communication of the "Formless" in a single significant gesture; and he smiled in reply. This, Yeats relates, was also how his friend, Shri Purohit Swami, received his "vision of the formless" by a simple glance from his master. More significantly, however, Yeats links this Zen transmission with the possibility of imprinting the power of the archetype through a sexual glance or a touch. Recalling in a letter the Buddha's holding up of the flower, he continues, "One feels at moments as if one could with a touch convey a vision—that the mystic way and sexual love use the same means—opposed yet parallel existences."

The prototypal instance of such a total transmission in the poetry occurs in "Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn." For the dead lovers, now attuned to the ultimate source, communication by touch has modulated into the conflagration of pure vision, the flesh transmuted into mystical orgasmic energy:

The miracle that gave them such a death
Transfigured to pure substance what had once
Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join
There is no touching here, nor touching there,
Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole;
For the intercourse of angels is a light
Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed.

This is a glimpse of transcendent "blessedness" in death. The other versions of that state, which punctuate the prophetic frenzy of the later poetry, are at once more personal and more empirically Zen-like in their contexts.

Here again the Yeatsian and Suzukian versions coincide. For Suzuki, "blessedness" has three connotations: it is the state of joy attendant on the cessation of "seeking" ("when seeking ceases you are blessed"); it involves the opening of "the third eye," the disclosure of the ultimate source; and it is the revelation of the concrete world in its numinous power, the blessedness of life discovered in the living of it. Although for Yeats, transcendent "blessedness" is reserved for those few who attain to the fourth stage of contemplation, that state "beyond generation" described both by Patanjali and The Mandukya Upanishad, or for the dead themselves, at last "obedient to die source," nevertheless the poems occasionally offer renderings of humbler epiphanies. These are actualized instances of Berkeley's dream of a concrete and radiant world, or of the Zen manifestation of a universe "that only exists because it shines and sounds."

The poem "Demon and Beast" (written before Yeats had read Suzuki, but whose central experience is thoroughly Zen-like) is built around an unheralded revelation of radical innocence in the natural world. Consequent on the resolution of conflict ("my hatred and desire") comes first of all an upsurge of "aimless joy," followed immediately by the disclosure of the sheer physicality of the "living birds" in St. Stephen's Green park. As the poem subsequently confirms, this is at best a miniature Satori, a brief epiphany, which flowers for half a day before fading. The poem "Vacillation (IV)" offers a parallel instance of the "blessedness" of the ordinary. Here the "blazing" out of a usual London shop and street is attendant on a new way of seeing, the abrupt enlargement of the physical senses, which heralds the onset of a brief benediction:

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessèd and could bless.

Both these epiphanies are "aimless," unprepared for and unsought after. The other type, coincident with the successful penetration of the "source" through self-questioning and final self-mastery, Yeats broaches only on one occasion in the poetry. In "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," "blessedness" is revealed as the outcome of the bitter acceptance and assimilation of the "curse" of existence, and of die blind violence and sexual humiliation which constitute the doom of each incarnation. It is precisely such purging and emptying which ultimately enables the poet and the concrete world to sink in upon one another in an embrace of "blessedness," which "sounds" out in laughter and song:

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

The obsession with "remorse" and "forgiveness" is of course an aspect of Yeats's Western inheritance, and is quite alien to Suzuki's presentation of Zen. Nevertheless the attainment of "blessedness" itself resembles many such instances as portrayed by Suzuki. There too, at the onset of Satori, the adept's voice rings out with the kind of laughter and joy, which shorn of all personal nuance, reverberate to the music of the "original source."