Zen Verbalism

[Zamurito]

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Zen verbalism has its own features, which violate all the rules of the science of linguistics. In Zen, experience and expression are one. Zen verbalism expresses the most concrete experience.

To give examples:

A Zen master produces his staff before his congregation and declares: "You do not call it a staff. What would you call it?" Someone comes out of the audience, takes the master's staff away from him, breaks it into two, and throws it down. All this is the outcome of the master's illogical announcement.

Another master, holding up his staff, says: "If you have one, I give you mine; if you have none, I will take it away from you." There is no rationalism in this.

Still another master once gave this sermon: "When you know what this staff is, you know all, you have finished the study of Zen." Without further remark he left the hall.

This is what I call Zen verbalism. The philosophy of Zen comes out of it. The philosophy, however, is not concerned to elucidate all these verbal "riddles" but to reach the mind itself, which, as it were, exudes or secretes them as naturally, as inevitably, as the clouds rise from the mountain peaks. What concerns us here is not the substance thus exuded or secreted, that is, words or language, but a "something" hovering around there, though we cannot exactly locate it and say "Here!" To call it the mind is far from the fact of experience; it is an unnamable "X." It is no abstraction; it is concrete enough, and direct, as the eye sees that the sun is, but it is not to be subsumed in the categories of linguistics. As soon as we try to do this, it disappears. The Buddhists, therefore, call it the "unattainable," the "ungraspable."

It is for this reason that a staff is a staff and at the same time not a staff, or that a staff is a staff just because it is not a staff. The word is not to be detached from the thing or the fact or the experience.