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CHAPTER SIX
BUT WHAT IS ZEN?
So far, so good. Or is it? Have we got anywhere at all? Are we a foot nearer Zen, or are we merely learning more and more about it? For Zen is not a new thing but a new way of looking at things. It is a new vision with the old eyes. It is a tardy awakening of the faculty of direct vision, a functioning of habitual consciousness from a plane above and beyond the sway of the opposites.
Being essentially beyond reason, it is useless to reason about it, or to use a normal reasonable approach. One must invent a new technique, and anything is good which serves this end. The ponderous frontal attack of logic and dialectic is here of no avail, and serves but to build up further barriers between the attacker and the attacked (including, be it noted, the notion that there is anything to be attacked or anyone to attack). We must therefore adopt a more fluid plan of campaign, sniping rather than shelling the enemy positions and, in the end, by sheer speed and mobility arriving victorious at the point of our departure. For such is Zen; but let us try again.
Some may find it easier to feel Zen than to think it. Certainly it pertains to the world of poetry and music rather than to that of logic; to the heart and not to the thinking mind. It is, as already described, like a joke. You see it or you don't, for it cannot be explained. The Japanese find it in nature and not in books. Steinilber
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