Zen is a sect of Buddhism, from the Mahayana school which originated in China. Before being known as Zen in Japan, the tradition was known as Ch’an in China.
It isn’t just that though.
Zen has taken many forms through the years, especially as it arrived in the West in the mid 1900s. As it made its way over and crossed paths with the liberation of the beat generation, Zen shed its robes. People began to understand Zen without the religious ideals and aesthetic principles that defined it in the East. This was a time of rebirth for Zen, as writers, poets, philosophers, and even technologists expressed Zen, but without the limitations of form imposed by years of religious tradition and dogma.
Since trying LSD as a teenager, I’ve been passionately curious about Zen. It is the most penetrating and practical philosophy I’ve encountered in my life. How did LSD make me and countless other people interested in Zen? My current hypothesis is that LSD facilitated the realization of a universal state which takes many forms through various cultures, yet its essence is formless. I’ve found that Buddhism describes it best as emptiness, voidness, or as Śūnyatā in Sanskrit.
In his essay, LSD and the Enlightenment of Zen, Wilson Van Dusen writes:
“There is a central human experience, which alters all other experiences. It has been called satori in Japanese Zen, moksha in Hinduism, religious enlightenment or cosmic consciousness in the West. The experience is so central that people have spent their lives in search of it. Once found, life is altered because the very root of human identify has been deepened. I wish to draw attention to the fact that d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) appears to facilitate the discovery of this apparently ancient and universal experience.”
As hinted by Wilson, LSD allowed me to feel whole. A deep seated dissatisfaction with life occupied my entire adolescence. It was a spiritual longing, and it was cured by an experience facilitated by LSD. This longing comes back when I live out of harmony with my essential Nature. Fortunately, soon after the LSD experience, I began to seek ways to maintain that wholeness without reliance on exogenous tools such as LSD.
That brought me, to Zen.
What I Think About Zen
This is actually a more appropriate title for this essay, because if I were to genuinely answer what is Zen? in the true spirit of Zen, I would have you stare at a blank page.
As a philosophy, Zen is a kind of non-philosophy. It isn’t built upon the usual self-driven discursive form of either / or logic and judgement that defines the Western philosophical tradition. It isn’t based on reasoning. It transcends reasoning by transcending the self through a practice mainly composed of zazen and kōans.
Zen is all the above, but it is also a paradox I’ve struggled with. I’ve found that before being genuinely understood — embodied, lived — Zen is a paradox. It is paradoxical because Zen, as an expression of emptiness, is both form and formless. Yet in whatever form Zen is properly expressed, it is an expression of emptiness.
Emptiness, or Śūnyatā in Sanskrit, constitutes ultimate reality. In this essay, I use the term emptiness in all its semantic forms. It is an experiential state, an ontological feature of reality, and a phenomenological analysis of human experience.
The Heart Sutra, the most popular scripture of East Asian Buddhism says: “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Form and emptiness are the same. Form is an expression of emptiness. However, it takes a form (self, thought, concept, object) to consider that statement, and to try to understand it. Yet, it is only when I transcend form that I can begin to truly understand form as emptiness and emptiness as form.
The essential Nature of everything (all form) is emptiness, is Śūnyatā. Thus, the paradox appears in practice and in theory, when the student adopts form to realize emptiness and when the mind uses form to understand emptiness. Getting stuck in form is part of the path to emptiness, and for most of us, there is no quick path through form before getting emptiness.
Western people love form, we live for it. I’ve been a heavy thinker all my life. Thinking helps me find success in the Western world. I find solutions by thinking. I think my way into problems too, and for a while, I thought my way out of them. This tendency has proven to be an obstacle to Zen practice. Zen requires no-mind, or Mushin. That is, a mind not fixed or occupied by form (thought, emotion) and thus open and receptive to emptiness. In this way there is an absence of discursive ego-generated thinking and I am free to act and react without thoughts that detract from expressing my essential nature of emptiness in each moment.
Yet, at the same time, my thinking mind is an expression of my essential Nature, because, form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. So, for a while, I’ve been stuck in a loop of accepting my thinking as part of my path, and then trying to overcome it.
Fortunately, practice works. Meditation has allowed me to calm the thought-formations of my mind and tune into emptiness, my essential Nature. I’ve slowly begun to understand Zen from a different perspective. This new perspective is no-perspective, it’s a perspective that doesn’t require thought-form. I’ve begun to understand emptiness through emptiness rather than through form.
I’ve begun to understand nothing, and as a Zen master I forgot the name of said: “Zen is the practice of understanding nothing. And understanding nothing takes time.”
Tradition as Innovation
As I began practicing Zen at a center, with a master and a community, I enjoyed it deeply, but not for long. As my practice matured, I felt that the forms that define Zen tradition were constricting. Having to wear a robe over my clothes, having to sit in a very specific posture, having to speak to the master in a very specific way. It all began to feel like the whole aesthetic form of Zen tradition was another form-trap.
So I left. I stopped going to the center and I began practicing what I thought was a higher or truer form of Zen. I was no longer trapped by the forms of Zen tradition.
Of course, this was another trap. I thought that by giving up the forms that have defined Zen for centuries, I was closer to realizing emptiness. However, because form is emptiness and emptiness is form, all I was really doing by striking out was adopting attachments to new forms that eventually obstructed my Zen practice. I wasn’t yet free enough from form to leave the formal structure of Zen tradition. Tradition exists for a reason. Zen tradition is the expression of emptiness through form which facilitates the realization of emptiness.
As emptiness is increasingly a part of the moments that make up my life, I see myself coming back to these traditional forms. I am beginning to understand why Zen tradition is maintained in this way, because form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
All traditions were once innovations, and Zen tradition is very innovative as it facilitates the transcendence of form, thus the realization of emptiness. As long as you don’t get stuck in the form of Zen tradition either. One must realize that, the form of Zen tradition is ultimately also form. I think my path towards and away and back towards traditional Zen is a very natural path for Zen practitioners.
Departing Thoughts
So, what is Zen?
This is Zen. That is Zen.
Zen is life with nothing added.
But as soon as you think about Zen, what it is, how it works, you’ve lost it, kind of.
Zen is practical. It must be practiced to be understood. One can intellectually “get” Zen but to embody and live Zen, to truly understand Zen, one must practice zazen.
At first, Zen is practiced in the aim of achieving enlightenment or awakening, realizing the nature of reality as emptiness. Later, Zen is practiced because Zen is the ultimate expression of emptiness. You no longer desire emptiness. There is just emptiness. There’s nothing else.
Here, Zen becomes spontaneous. Zen becomes creative. Zen becomes.
Don’t get it? Just sit down and practice.
That which is before you is it.
Begin to reason about it and you will at once fall into error.
— Huang Po
Thanks for reading. I will be updating this essay as my understanding of Zen is refined. Maybe one day it will just be a blank page. Then you will know I’ve got it.
With love.
Wonderfully put. Words about no-thing. I make a blank page joke in my book! You’re stuck with my admiration Lou 🕉️🙏
I like Alan Watts description that "Zen is the act of effortlessly living" to live as you breathe.
He also describes Zen Koans as being like a joke. Something you feel that triggers enlightenment the same way a joke triggers laughter.
https://youtu.be/g12vq_J762A