The Secret of Zen

Zen by design is provocative. It’s intended this way to invoke a reaction or realisation from you; a moment of spontaneous enlightenment.

Zen stories are like riddles and can seem quite confusing, but they are all describing the same thing, and they are all paradoxical. If you take them literally, you will find them frustrating, confusing and meaningless. But actually, that means they’re working. In a way, that is exactly the kind of reaction they are intended to invoke.

A key principle of Zen is that the more you try to explain something, the less sense it makes. By attempting to explain enlightenment, these stories serve as excellent examples of how silly it is to think we could put it into words in the first place.

This is why Zen masters will say things like “I have nothing to teach”.

When the great Zen master went to his teacher and asked,
“What is the way to liberation?”
The teacher replied,
“Who is restraining you?”
”No one”
”If so, why should you ask for liberation?”

The stories approach the same problem but from different angles and with different levels of complexity. But always the intention is to make us aware of our own confusion; the futile search for external answers to a self-made problem.

How can someone else know the solution to a problem that you, yourself created?

Another story regales of a time when a powerful man visited the Buddha. When discussing attachment, the man explained how the death of his wife would be unimaginably painful for him, and he could not possibly continue to live without her. To this, the Buddha asked him, “if you could not live without her, how did you live before you met her?”

Meeting his wife gave him great happiness, but why would losing her make him miserable? What if he’d never met her at all? He could look at the experience from the perspective that he’s been robbed; he deserves to have more time with her and the world is unjust. Or he could look at it from the perspective that he’s lucky to have met her and grateful to have had her in his life as long as he did.

This is a great example of how we experience life subjectively based on our conditioning. We always have a story for why we feel a certain way, or how we ended up here. But in reality, our experience is more or less the same as it always has been; it’s just the lens in which we view it that changes. This is why some people can have nothing, yet be completely fulfilled in life, while others have more than most could dream of having, but are deeply unsatisfied with life.

Of course this isn’t something we can change easily, it’s deeply embedded and it starts from childhood. But it almost entirely dictates our experience. Most of the time we’re not aware of how our views shape our experience, but Zen serves as a way to remind us of this and shows us that we can “unlearn” some of these views which ultimately can make us quite unhappy.

And so, the purpose of Zen is not to teach, but to unteach. It’s supposed to help you to let go of the unnecessary burdens in life. It’s like a mirror in which you can see your own overly-serious, heavy-hearted struggles as things you unknowingly carried. This is perhaps why enlightenment has been described as such: “It’s just like normal life, except about two feet off the ground”.

The purpose of the Zen master is to make you realise you’ve been programmed to behave in a certain way, and to undo the programming. If we look at life through a lens that has been shaped through our experiences, you could say the purpose is to clean the lens so it has no imperfections. The real point is to realise there never was a lens.