Reading about Zen is not revealing the truth or secret of Zen which is the attainment it requires. While Zen’s written word is ‘about’ Zen, the about-ness is problematic insofar as we are moving around the outside of Zen.
We can envision the problem from a page out of a 13th century Zen text, The Gateless Barrier 無門關 consisting of forty-eight koans. We can also render 無門關, Mumon’s Barriers, the barriers being the forty-eight koans. We can further imagine these barriers to be doors in a circular castle the center of which contains the secret of Zen. If we can manage to unlock any door, we discover Zen’s secret.
Reading about Zen will only keep us on the outside of the circular castle of Zen that surrounds its mystical core. We can never enter its sacred interior this way. Even if a good teacher reminds his students, citing from the four slogans of Zen that Zen, does not depend on written words (不立文字) it won’t stop the madness of some who insist upon reading about Zen too much. Even Zen master Huangbo understood the problem with Zen being put into a textual form in which the essence of Zen is believed to be. He said:
"If it [Zen] can be understood in this manner, then it isn’t the true teaching. If it can be seen in paper and ink, then it is not the essence of our order.”
Zen does not even rely on sitting in a prescribed manner on a zafu, ramrod straight, called, zazen (坐禪). The problem it presents is, essentially, no different from reading a dozen or so books about Zen. Neither can gain access to the hidden truth of Zen. When Zen masters such as the Sixth patriarch Huineng attacked zazen it was an attack directed at just physical sitting which had turned into a lifeless ritual.
In addition, that Zen is meant to make us feel good either by reading about Zen or doing zazen only serves to mask what is really required of us: that we should be presuppositionless and open to allowing the absolute to enter us which culminates in the intuition of the absolute. This is just saying in different words, that the realization of Zen’s secret rests upon the sudden stopping of all mentation which acts as a barrier.
Comments