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Prodigious Detour. Koestler dwells lovingly on some of the more incongruous (to Westerners) aspects of Yoga, including the "painful [Hindu] obsession with the bowel functions, which permeates religious observances and social custom." Like many a Westerner before him, he was impressed with such yogi feats as reversing peristalsis to take in fluids through the anus and urethra, but was depressed by the far-out theories that went with them—such as that the sperm (bindu) is stored in the head and should be prevented from leaving the body at all costs. The result, says Koestler, is that a large number of Hindu men "suffer from what one might call spermal anxiety."
Samadhi, the trancelike bliss that is the yogi's goal, is for Koestler the closest thing possible to death, and the practice of Yoga is "a systematic conditioning of the body to conniving in its own destruction, at the command of the will, by a series of graduated stages." Koestler erroneously thinks that the "Christian ascetic mortifies his body to hasten its return to dust."* This, he holds, at least has the merit of directness over the yogi's "prodigious detour. He must build up his body into a superefficient, super-sentient instrument of self-annihilation."
Asleep or Awake. Japan was no wet diaper, but "a scented bath which gives you electric shocks at unexpected moments." Many of the shocks came from Zen Buddhism, which Koestler feels makes sense in Japan's rigidly conformist social structure. "Taken at face value and considered in itself," he writes, "Zen is at best an existentialist hoax, at worst a web of solemn absurdities. But within the frame work of Japanese society, this cult of the absurd, of ritual leg-pulls and nose-tweaks, made beautiful sense. It was, and to a limited extent still is, a form of psychotherapy for a selfconscious, shame-ridden society, a technique of undoing the strings which tied it into knots."
The object of Zen is satori (enlightenment), and Koestler thinks this is the opposite of Yoga's aim, samadhi. "Samadhi is the elimination of the conscious self in the deep sleep of Nirvana; satori is the elimination of the conscious self in the wide-awake activities of intuitive living . . . To make the point quite clear: literally, samadhi means 'deep sleep,' satori means 'awakening.' Mystically, of course, 'deep sleep' means entering into Real Life, whereas the Awakened one 'lives like one already dead.' But cynically speaking, it is less risky and more pleasant to choose the Zen path—to live in Nirvana rather than be dead in Nirvana."
Intuition v. Reason. In Japan, Koestler observed, the techniques of Zen "show remarkable psychological insight and produce some equally remarkable results." But the results are far from remarkable when Zen is exported overseas and seeded among Western intellectuals with an entirely different cultural background. "They tried hard to obey its command: 'Let your mind go and become like a ball in a mountain stream'; the result was a punctured tennis ball surrounded by garbage, bouncing down the current from a burst water main."