When I set up the precursor to this blog a few months ago, it was about Zen, but all I could write was either paradoxical or the rational observation that Zen is paradoxical.
I gradually meandered towards Zen in my ’spiritual search’. Zen was where I stopped, or rather, where I set off in a very different direction, as though I had come to the end of the spiritual alphabet and fallen off. It’s hard to say whether I have dropped Zen: I still hold some of its major tenets as likely truths, if one can actually say it has any. In a sense, that is the strength and the weakness of Zen: the truth is unspeakable; hence there is nothing else to agree or disagree with (though one can, of course, agree or disagree that truth is unspeakable).
Here immediately the paradox is evident: did I mean ‘unthinkable’? Did I formulate that central proposition in the right words? Of course, if you understand what it means, there is no way to answer that: all dualities, in fact, fall away or are abandoned, along with all categories. Zen is unspeakable and unthinkable because it is – fundamentally – silent. Read the full article…
Posted by John Freestone 
