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CHAPTER SEVEN
ZEN TECHNIQUE
The process of Zen is a leap from thinking to knowing, from second-hand to direct experience. For those unable to make the leap for themselves a bridge must be built which, however rickety, being built for the occasion before being flung away, will land the traveller on the “other shore” of enlightenment. But the best of bridges will still partake of the nature of a leap, of a spark between two terminals, and sense must yield to non-sense before a sense appears compared with which "dull reason's cautious certainty” is dull indeed. But “just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so, perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible to the intellect. For, as Alan Watts goes on to say in a well-known passage, “Zen does not attempt to be intelligible, that is, understood by the intellect. The method of Zen is to baffle, excite, puzzle and exhaust the intellect until it is realised that intellection is only thinking about; it will provoke, irritate and again exhaust the emotions until it is realised that emotion is only feeling about, and then it contrives, when the disciple has been brought to an intellectual and emotional impasse, to bridge the gap between second-hand, conceptual contact with reality, and first-hand experience."'i
Any and every type of material may be used in the 1 The Spirit of Zen, pp. II-I2.
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