To some obsessed with logical precision who do
not wish to grant paradoxes to traditions and thought, there lies an
interesting challenge within the Zen tradition.
The undisputed founder of Zen, Bodhidharma,
left the world to sit for nine years and gaze at a wall until he reached some
sort of “Enlightenment.” (I will be putting large and important Buddhist terms
such as “Enlightenment” in quotes for a reason that will be known soon.) There
was always an anti-intellectual stream in Zen that always has confused
practitioners and Westerns alike.
How can a tradition that seems to be so
anti-intellectual not only last so long, but also be so popular in the West,
which praises intellectuality? Did somebody miss something and all
practitioners of Zen are just morons, including myself? I would like to believe
that that is not the case but there is something deeper going on here.
Within my first blog post, which I will keep as
short as possible, I would like to quickly explain that Zen practitioners
generally know what they are dealing with when they encounter a tradition like
Zen. It is not as it seems, anti-intellectuality, as understood here in the
West is not what Zen is about.
Zen is no stranger to this as well; much of Zen
writing is focused on the idea of forgetting the debates and just sitting. That
is what Zen is all about. Yet in order to have a successful teaching practice
be sustained there has to be records on what to do in meditation, how to
achieve “Enlightenment” or “Realization” and so forth. All of those experiences
and expectations must be carefully articulated. If it was just left to the
person to just sit in silence for thirty-five minutes a day then Zen would
never have existed. Something incredibly inappropriate must take place in order
to maintain the Zen tradition, we have to write about the experience of
silence.
How on Earth do we do something like that?
Suddenly anti-intellectuality flies out the
window and must be abandoned because any sort of articulation of silence must
include precise vocabulary and rhetoric. Without it, the goals of Zen and the
teaching of Zen would remain meaningless and silence would remain just that,
silent. Now we have another issue that we Zen folk have to undertake.
“Enlightenment” takes place during silent meditation. Right?
Well, we really have no idea.
To examine early texts and even browsing
through popular modern Zen texts one finds an enormous attempt of describing
the moment “Enlightenment” can be achieved. But in Zen philosophy
“Enlightenment” is every moment and paradise is attained when it is realized at
that given moment. This is very important because mundane situations and day-to-day
occurrences now must hold a vocabulary that for the Christian tradition would
hold the same weight as the word “Salvation.” Zen philosophy now has to find
precise definitions and phrasing that hold enough weight to describe moments
that don’t really have much weight at all. This is certainly a sort of paradox
but it is an important one that can be granted and can’t be ignored.
So finally I get to my point.
Language, even when speaking of moments where
language isn’t present, is vital to the experience of “Enlightenment.” Without
it, “Enlightenment” could not be attained in any significant sense because the
dynamic between language and “Enlightenment” become meshed.
Which one comes first? The chicken or the egg?
“Enlightenment” or me talking about “Enlightenment?” Does one evoke the other,
do they evoke each other? Do they fall under the other Buddhist idea of
interdependency? It seems as if though they must because we have no other
choice but to speak and write of “Enlightenment” and it has no other choice but
to capture us in moments when we begin to articulate what exactly it can be.
“Enlightened” monks write works
post-Enlightenment (if that can even somehow be calculated, which it can’t)
which then evokes “Enlightenment” in others. It seems to be as simple as that.
The lesson we need to take from this is that language is essential to the
understanding of times when it seems to be vacant, such as sitting on the
meditation cushion. But to abandon discourse regarding the relationship and
rely entirely what is believed to be raw experience is romantic and not
possible, a hard lesson that the West must learn regarding Zen.
So tell me. Does this post evoke
“Enlightenment” or am I writing this because I am “Enlightened?” Or both?
Regardless, to describe either one of those is to not to fall back on language
and lose our Zen enthusiasm, but to understand the tricky pathways through Zen
thinking and be glad in the puzzles that it creates for us.
- Denis Kurmanov
