Why has Zen attracted artists and intellectuals? The answer usually given is that it has favoured expression through the arts and offered relief from the strain of logic. This is true for some adherents, but for others--the easy-going, work-shy "Bohemians"--the main attraction has been its indifference to discipline, to training. Many of them are painters who put blobs of formless colour on canvas and call it a work of art, musicians who throw together a cacophony of disjointed sound and call it a melody. They have evaded the harder way of learning the techniques of art already; it is a continuation of the same attitude to evade the harder way of learning the techniques of philosophical disciplined work on themselves. The Short Path teaching seems so simple, its practices attack the goal so directly, and the goal itself is set so near that no one need be surprised to observe the rapid growth of interest in Zen recently. Who wants to work patiently through the rigours of the Long Path, who wants to toil through preparatory stages when a swifter, perhaps even sudden, way is available? Moreover, the Zenists assert that they want to be "natural" and that moral discipline is artificial imitative discipline. So they throw overboard all disciplines, all work on themselves, and give lust, passion, impulse, and egoism a full and free rein.
-- Notebooks Category 23: Advanced Contemplation > Chapter 2 : Pitfalls and Limitations > # 78
