The No-Mountain Of Zen

 painting: Advayam (P., non dual) cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown

For most, the term ‘zen’ references the capacity to find the ‘zen moment’ which is to say, is calmness when all around you leans toward the chaotic. The goal is to find the zen of basketball or to breathe calmly in the chaos of flight cancellations so that it’s really not about ‘zen’ at all. Such a view, hides ‘zen’ and corrals it in a facile attempt to tamed it down from remaining an irritating problem [effusive, ineffable, meta-physical] to something kind to us. There, we can continue to struggle whether we want a side- or middle part in our hair and which might best fit in to that which is culturally happening.  Far more than calmness, serenity is a dusty [with no place for dust to finally alight], tangible luminosity, “…a certain light,” non-meta-physical, emanating from everything that is more akin to the wondrous capacity that ‘zen’ references.

With some calmness, the sense of grasping ‘zen’ is not resolved. Myriad books are written about ‘zen’ in attempts to offer a hold on that which lies beyond words, and yet, all tend to sum in a sense of ‘what zen is Not’ rather than giving the ‘answer.’ To ‘get zen’ seems an intense trial up a likely impassable mountain to reach a summit that disappears in the clouds, whereabouts unknown.

And yet, the true summit doesn’t sit at the top of a mountain or even a mole hill. It is already inherently attained as mindfulness meditation Jon Kabat Zinn posited, “Wherever You Are, You Are Already There.”

Even though already there, there is a ‘mountain’ that appears in thought and emotion that is essentially contrived of words. We become our words, and our identity is commonly expressed in words.

Words cut up thought and emotion into parts in a broad variety of directions. When words integrate, they describe fittedness within a stage set of objects and events.

There is a mountain comprised of layers of words. In the foothills, where we are likely to remain stuck forever, there are the pronouns of I, we, you, they, me, him, her, them. Who am I ?The more immersed physically in the landscape, such as in indigenous society, the less apartness and the less power of pronouns, and the less strong force they hold in daily life.

Glimpsing ‘wholeness,’ higher up the terrain of words, seem to introduce a ‘softness’ into thoughts and sensations such as sound and color and form. There may be a quite rational ‘ecological’ sense of how as the Earth’s seasonal tilt opens the cherry tree’s blossom suggest that events are inseparable, so that The Whole World Is A Single Flower.

Still, “What is the sound of a single hand?” leads up a challenging mountain trail comprised of the term ‘sound.’ For the adept-to-be, there may be a loosening here. Words become more fluid so that sound and color and form become intermixed rather than as comfortably separable as they are in the everyday. For example, the possibility of something like ‘seeing sound’ may open. At first, this seems a false trail or maybe, finally, the ‘true’ answer. Still, delusion or a step forward? 

While there is a new sense of ‘freedom’ in thought and emotion, words are likely to still carry heavy weight and it countries to feel in thought and emotion as if we are walking up a mountain rather than having arrived at a Zinn “There.” Words still cling to the body for ‘safety,’ still seem to come from an inside the body looking out at sensations, still seem to require a lot of dusting off to see with any clarity.

To attain ‘zen essence’ is to step though the veil of ‘mountain’ and even ‘mole hill’ where

“The mouse eats cat food, but the cat bowl is broken.” Here is There, and more than this, to where it may be realized that there never was primarily  a ‘you’ that is perceiving.

**Perhaps a coming post, Toward Ch'an, that will precede this post in this Zen Za Wild Grass blog the near future will be of interest.