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BUT WHAT IS ZEN?
115 "Muge”. “Each individual Ji is not only dissolved unimpededly in Ri but also each in the other individually, mutually, and totalistically. So, when I lift a finger, the whole of the world of Fi is found dissolved in it, and not only the world as such but each individual reality separately."1 In other words, as I understand the learned author of that explanation (and I thought I did when I took it down from him), the doorknob is the cat and the cat is the doorknob, but though they are both interfused in one they never cease to be the doorknob and the cat respectively. Which is absurd, but Zen.
So what? Let us consider the technique by which for a thousand years unnumbered Chinese, Korean and Japanese Zen Buddhists have understood this absurdity, and all the other absurdities which are truth in the world beyond the reasoning mind. For the bridge must be made between reason and truth, between conceptual thought and Zen. The process of thought cannot think beyond itself, yet Zen is beyond it. Where is the bridge? The goose is in the bottle. It grows. How to get it out without hurting the goose or breaking the bottle? The answer is clear: “There-it's out!"
1 The Essence of Buddhism, SUZUKI, p. 45.
