Zig. Buddhism stemmed from a vision, a vision that was literally world-transforming, for when the Buddha came to his senses (as we rightly say) after his enlightenment under the Bo-tree, the world that greeted him was very different from the one that he had left. During that night that was to portend so much for the historical future--the Buddhist sangha is the oldest humanly devised institution that is still intact--the Buddha's meditation had deepened until, as the morning star glittered in the transparent sky, his mind pierced the bubble of the universe and shattered it to naught; only, wonder of wonders, to find it restored with the effulgence of true being. "Wonder of wonders," he is reported to have exclaimed, speaking now from what his Third Eye had disclosed to him, "all things intrinsically are Buddha-nature. There is a Buddha in every grain of sand ".

Zag. Twenty-five hundred years later people are still having their Third Eyes opened, only now often through microscopic ingestions of a small class of entheogenic plants and chemicals. This difference may not be quite as different as it sounds, for medical anthropologists have discovered that brain changes that result from taking entheogens are very much like those that are produced by physical exhaustion from prolonged fasting and other ordeals of the sort the Buddha undertook before he assumed his seat under the Bodhi Tree. This being the case, it may be one of the great paradoxes of history that one of its greatest religions was launched (chemically speaking) by a state of mind that is virtually indistinguishable from ones that are produced by fudging the fifth of the Five Precepts in the Eightfold Path that the Buddha prescribed as leading to enlightenment, the one that proscribes the taking of intoxicants.

Zen. Be that as it may, there is a saying that Zen is slippery and slick, like picking up an egg with a pair of silver chopsticks, and the saying certainly holds when it comes to the presiding issue of this book, the relation between Zen and entheogens. Aspects of this issue extend back to the times when Zen took shape. There has been a long standing debate as to whether enlightenment arrives suddenly or gradually, and the issue split Zen into its two major schools, with Rinzai Zen championing the former view, and Soto Zen the later. Satori--a thumping foretaste of Nirvana--is important in Rinzai, whereas Soto settles for passing glimpses of it called kenshos. Both schools require rigorous training, but in Rinzai the rigor reaches samarai proportions, with sleep deprivation a major factor. This fits in with the anthropologists' discovery that ordeals bring on chemical brain states that accompany major epiphanies.

The book in hand. A major virtue of this particular collection of essays and art is that it rigorously abstains from drawing conclusions regarding the never-never land it leads the reader into. Readers will not find here any attempt to turn the slippery Zen egg into putty that chopsticks could handle with ease. Instead, the book lays before the reader the major issues that must be taken into account in any serious reflection on this problem. Entheogens have entered Buddhism to stay; there can be no turning back from the point that has been reached. Nor can the issue any longer be swept under the rug. The facts that bear on the matter are contained in these pages, as are the leading theories that try to make sense of the facts. Compelling visionary art and vivid accounts of personal encounters lace the facts and theories together in ways that make for a gripping experience. This book will be a landmark for years to come.

Berkeley, 2001