The intellectual mind swims in a sea of words and therein drowns in the same sea without ever finding terra firma. Zen or dhyāna is intended to rescue us from this sea by delivering us to solid ground. At the back of our words with their word-based meanings there is a more profound reality. It can be met with face-to-face but not with words or mental images which are born from our imagination.
It is not enough to say don't conceptualize or don't use words, or just sit in silence. Such a practice is doomed to fail. Yes, it is true that Zen uses words but these words are meant to point to that which cannot be put into words. Only a few manage to accomplish this, the rest fail.
What is our Buddha-nature? First of all, it is not something we can share with others. And it is certainly not our awareness which only attends to things which are conditioned and finite (this even includes our thoughts).
The Buddha never shared his enlightenment with anyone. Sure, he talked about it and made constant references to it but he didn't hand it over to a single person. The transmission of the True Dharma is not interpersonal. Not a thing is transmitted to the student. One simply awakens to what Siddhartha himself intuitively realized.
But how long is it before Zen and with it Buddhism finally become taken over by the intellectuals of our age? How long did it take the Chinese literati to dominate Zen, who had enormous political power, and by doing so seemed to forget that Zen is an intuitive path which transcends the intellect?
Personally, I have nothing against the intellect or intellectuals except that they cannot go where Zen goes which is on a path of intuition. Eventually, we come to a point in our Zen practice where we have to drop mentation, including our prized intellectual approach. We have to leap out of this sea of words to draw our first breath of spirit.
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