Waiting for Godot Zen

Certainly one of my favorite plays, Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, is most valuable because it often provides me with food for thought.

The title of the play pretty much tells you everything important about the play.  The main characters in the play wait for Godot to show up.  However, Godot never shows up.  In the meantime, the characters pass the time in conversation and encounters with two odd passerby.  

The play, itself, lacks what we expect a play to be.  The play offers us no clues as to whom Godot is or is not or whom he represents.  What we can be certain of is that Godot doesn't show up and the main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, continue to wait for Godot not sure he said he would even come.  We could even say that the thrust of the play is about waiting.

Godot, we might imagine, is Jesus, or it could be our search for enlightenment.  Along with this, there is also an almost unbearable sense of doubt in the play, but never quite getting to 'all is in vain'.  In this respect, the characters always live trapped somewhere between hopelessness and hope.

Looking at the current state of Zen or the state of modern Buddhism from this play, imagining that Vladimir and Estragon practice Zen, Zen has gone beyond waiting.  It has, instead, taken up 'sitting', accepting that just sitting alone is enlightenment (Godot?).  There is no longer any Godot or enlightenment to wait for.  There is nothing to be done except to just sit.  Such a Zen play would be entitled, Sitting is Enlightenment.

But our Zen play, just like Waiting for Godot, hasn't succeeded in getting rid of the unbearable sense of doubt nor the condition that the sitter is situated between hopelessness and hope.

 

Comments

[Jughead]

I will give myself 'thirty blows' for that earlier comment of mine. Apparently, I stumbled over your 'all is in vain' (Great Doubt?)and hit my head on 'sitting is Enlightenment' and was unconscious after that. I didn't come around 'til a careful re-reading cleared my head. A very fine mini-essay, indeed!

[Frank]

This is a brilliant micro-essay.

[Jugsewell]

You must admit that this idea that 'sitting is Enlightenment' is primarily a Japanese take on Zen? Classical Chan includes this notion(perhaps modified), but it can hardly be said that this is what Chan is about without risking a slide towards the kind of rigidity the Japanese have often been accused of spreading. Besides, it is a rather pedestrian analysis of Beckett's play, where all's resolved by merely 'doing the right thing', no offense.