All religions must deal with the tragedy that human existence can so often become. But in doing so most religions take themselves so serious, as to have little or no place for the comedy that life can also be. If Western religions have a place for comedy it is very difficult to see. Judaism, with its long history of exile and persecution, has little reason to experience anything comical about God. Christianity, with its focus on original sin and the sacrificial nature of the crucifixion, must find the idea of a comical God near blasphemous. With the exception of Sufism, Islam’s God of the jihad is too serious to be comical. A comical element, however, is found in some forms of Sufism, in Taoism, and in Zen.

The comic element is very important in Zen since it allow us to laugh. In a world of discontent and suffering, laughter prevents us from taking ourselves too seriously. It gives us the ability to laugh at our own foolishness, and even at life’s worst ordeals. This permits us to let go of the ego and to self-transcend which enlightenment itself.

A formal acceptance of laughter is one of the characteristics that sets Zen apart from most other forms of Buddhism. When Buddhism arrived in China its view of life as predominantly one of dissatisfaction left little room for laughter. However, Taoism had a lot of room for laughter, and Zen adopted much of this. It is the approval of laughter that gives Zen the potential for valuing not only compassion (karuna), but also love.

Love in Zen is not the same as it is in Christianity, nor is it a mere extension of the standard Mahayana Buddhist commandment to show compassion to all beings. Love in Zen is a love for or delight in the world. Both Christian love and Buddhist compassion are based on a belief in the need to be saved from the world of sin or suffering. Moreover, like most salvation religions they are almost entirely concerned with human existence, and they either ignore nature as being unimportant, as in Christianity, or as one of the sources of human suffering, as in standard Buddhism. The world for Zen means both the human one and the world of nature. Salvation implies that life here and now is subordinate or inferior to some future existence after death. To be able to love nature, on the other hand, is to be in love with life in all its manifestations in the here and now. To love life is to be able to find humor in it despite the suffering in it. Humor, furthermore, reminders us that life is paradoxical, indeed, even somewhat absurd; yet it is just such absurdity that can make life a lovable mystery. The lack of laughter in both official Christianity and standard Buddhism suggests how little delight these religions find in this-worldly human life, much less in that of nature.

The ability of Zen to laugh is most distinctly shown by the Zen use of iconoclastic humor, even toilet humor. There is a famous old Zen story that says that one day a novice monk inquired of his master as to what the Buddha was. The master’s response was that the Buddha was dried shit on an ass-wiping stick. The purpose of this and similar stories is never irreverence for its own sake. Instead, it uses them first to shock the student out of stifling devotionalism, and second to remind the student that all things are at the same time equally holy and profane. This is part of the realization of the non-duality of reality. In other words, such humor is used to aid the student on the very serious path to enlightenment. The serious use of this particular type of humor is demonstrated by the fact that the ordinary practitioner, not to mention someone from outside the tradition, will be severely chastised for unauthorized indulging in it. It is only to be employed by those teachers who have the deepest faith in the practice. The use by the unqualified is not humorous, it is just sacrilegious, insulting and anti-Zen.

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