Stalking Venus

I don’t understand Zen and Zen thinking.

My acceptance of this fact makes my understanding of Zen and Zen thinking flawless. My awareness of this acceptance makes me wise.

My belief in my wisdom and the flawlessness of my understanding, is a flaw in my understanding and wisdom. This is normal.

Look, don’t get me wrong. A lot of Zen-type philosophy (an unsuitable word, but one I’ll use for now) can seem like egotistical posturing by self-absorbed language-wankers - and to be honest, a lot of it is. The annoying thing with Zen kōans - the nonsensical riddles and word plays of that school of being - is that they directly contravene the structured rules of logic that we require so that our perception of reality doesn’t disintegrate. This means that we have an instant aversion to them that ranges from the mildly amused, to the outraged.

When some enlightened guru tells us that Buddha can only be found by killing Buddha, the first and often incredibly fleeting thought we have is one of confusion. For many people, this confusion is instantly replaced by irritation or even anger. The reason for this irritation is that there is an instant conflict created by the guru’s very posing of the statement. The conflict can be summarised so:

• This person is claiming to have wisdom and understanding of things.
• This person is telling me something that doesn’t make sense.
• I am angered that my time has been wasted.

The anger comes from our (western, Judeo-Christian) societal conditioning that things must make immediate sense in order for them to be of use. The brain is trained from birth to begin filtering information and it becomes more and more refined at doing so as each moment passes. This means that when we are expecting wisdom and information from someone who has declared himself able to dispense such, our crap-ditching filters have to be overridden when what we hear , is nonsense.

It is the overriding of these filters that can, with proper understanding (or open-mindedness, which is the same thing) force the brain into a state of momentary full conciousness. It is the moment when passive thought is, by necessity, pushed aside and full attention must be brought to bear to actively look at the guru’s kōan. When it doesn’t make immediate sense, the standard unschooled response is annoyance.

To delve a little deeper:

Notice that I have not used the words ’seeming’ or ‘apparent’ when referring to these nonsense kōans. This is because they are nonsense. They literally do not make any sense. We cannot comprehend them without further action. If we could, they would not be nonsense, and hence, not kōans.

This state of incomprehension is the prime state of all creatures. When humans are born, they have not yet been trained by their environment and experiences to form a coherent working model of reality from the flood of information entering their assorted sense organs. From this void state (which is also referred to somewhat dismally by some traditions as The Abyss) the only, and therefore default position is one of filtering, learning, labelling and testing. Hence the expression, “from the void, springs all” or similar variations.

From all this we can see the purpose and mechanism of action of the kōan. If we were to look at it as a series of computer instructions or code, it would be something along the lines of the following:

1. Disrupt the default active state of filtering, learning, labelling and testing (by hearing the kōan).
2. Return the mind to the blank accepting state of void. This happens automatically if you remain open-minded.
3. Restart the default state of filtering, learning, labelling and testing, but with the kōan as a starting parameter or program to be run.
4. Wait for result.

It’s the ‘waiting for result’ that stumps many people. Our default nature, when returned to the void, is to acquire meaning. It is our base nature (referred to by all Buddhist traditions as the state of the Buddha, or enlightenment). Paradoxically, and definitely counter-intuitively, this is an inactive state. It requires no action at all - not even our own belief in, or acceptance of our inherent natural ability to acquire understanding.

A final word on the whole thing:

There’s always going to be some joker out there who tries to pass himself off as a guru for whatever reason. Maybe he’s out to make money, or maybe he likes the feeling of power it gives him, or maybe he’s just having a laugh. To me, this is the ultimate kōan. Here’s why:

A kōan is nonsense, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. We don’t have understanding of it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it, build our own framework of understanding and learning around it, or even dismiss it after objective consideration.

A kōan dispensed by a wise old oriental monk is often given greater merit than one dispensed by the local village drunk, but this merit is only assigned because of our own egos. What is an ego if not a socially-skewed assemblage of filtered, learned, labelled and tested information?

The state of enlightenment is an unstudied, unhurried, perfectly aware acceptance of the inactive void base condition, and our own natural position of growth within it.

That is why the true understanding that there is no single piece of nonsense, and no great collection of nonsense that is more important than another, can be considered to be the Great Kōan which leads to the enlightened state. In the Buddhist traditions, this understanding is called the Kalama Sutta.

“But,” you say. “I still don’t get it.”

Well… I’m afraid then you need to go and be a monk to find out.

Sorry. Typo… I meant monkey.