Page 8 - Zen Tzu

rational terms. These two presumptions quite correctly suggest
that the Zen Tzu is much closer to an exercise in creativity than it
is to any measure of translational accuracy. It is a transcription,
but only in the loosest sense of the term. And third, although the
use of words is anathema to both Taoism and Zen, the Zen Tzu is
nothing but an entire book of words, all presuming to be a source
of inspiration, insight and guidance. It is a project only justified
when the cautionary warnings of impending confusion have been
overcome by the inspired impulse of a reckless daring, a common
dynamic in our adventure with words.

But this is our paradoxical relationship with words. We use
them because we must. They have become so ingrained in our
consciousness and such an integral part of our thinking that we
forget they are not reality, but only a representation of it. To be
free of words is to be free of their limitations—a freedom that is
both intimated and explicitly repeated in Taoism and Zen. Those
who are able to escape the authority of words will find that their
emancipated consciousness enters an unanchored and indefinable
place where the boundaries of cultural standards and order do not
apply, and where a return to one's authentic self is experienced as
an unfettered wandering within a liberating spaciousness. Release
is another term that identifies this process of losing words so that
awareness can enter a condition of finding.

Words only seem to exist because of the cultural constructs
of cognition that we have invented and adopted as a measure of
reality. But this construct doesn't really exist, we just pretend it
does—and neither Taoism nor Zen are interested in pretending.
So they play with words, but they do not take them seriously. In
actuality, the words they do use start nowhere and end nowhere.
They are only used to point toward a whole experience that is
temporally continuous, is undifferentiated by distinctions, and is
unrepresentable in language. The direct experience to which they
point does not reside in any of the thoughts that are engendered
by words, but in the receptive emptiness that comes before them,
that resides between them, and that echoes after them. Therefore,
everything ever said or written about Taoism and Zen directs our
attention to an experience that is beyond the capability of words
to express.

This experience is consciousness itself, which only seems
mysterious because it is inexplicable. All efforts to explain it will
only provoke a sense of intrigue because no amount of thinking

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