A noted Christian Father of the early Middle Ages once exclaimed : “O poor Aristotle! Thou who has discovered for the heretics the art of dialectics, the art of building up and destroying the art of discussing all things and accomplishing nothing!” So much ado about nothing, Indeed! See how philosophers of all ages contradict one another after spending all their logical acumen and analytical ingenuity on the so-called problems of science and knowledge. No wonder the same old wise man, wanting to put a stop once for all to all such profitless discussions, has boldly thrown the following bomb right into the midst of those sand-builders: “Certum est quia impossible est” ("[this] is certain because [it] is) or, more logically, “Credo quia absurdum est.” (I believe because it is irrational); is this not an unqualified confirmation of Zen?
An old master brought out his stick before an assemblage of monks and said: “O monks do you see this? If you see it, what is it you see? Would you say, “It is a stick?” If you do, you are ordinary people, you have no Zen. But if you say, “We do not see any stick,” then I would say, “Here I hold one, and how can you deny the fact?”” There is no trifling in Zen. Until you have a third eye opened to see into the inmost secret of things, you cannot be in the company of the ancient sages. What is this third eye that sees the stick and yet sees it not? Where does one get this illogical apprehension of things?
Zen says, “Buddha preached forty-nine years and yet his ‘broad tongue’ (tanujihva) never once moved. Can one talk without moving one’s tongue? Why this absurdity? The explanation given by Gensha (Hsuan-sha, 831-908) follows : “All those piously inclined profess to bless others in every possible way; but when they come across three kinds of invalids, how would they treat them? The blind cannot see even if a stick or a mallet is produced; the deaf cannot hear however fine the preaching may be; and the dumb cannot talk however much they are urged to do so. But if these people severally suffering cannot somehow to be benefited, what good is there after all in Buddhism?” The explanation does not seem to explain anything after all. Perhaps Butsugen’s (Fo-yen) comment may throw more light on the subject. He said to his disciples : “You each have a pair of ears; what have you ever heard with them? You each have one tongue; what have you ever preached with it? Indeed, you have never talked, you have never heard, you have never seen. From whence then do all these forms, voices, odours and tastes come?” (That is to say, where does this world come from?)
If this remark still leaves us where we were before, let us see whether Ummon (Yun-men, died 966), one of the greatest of Zen masters who ever lived can help us. A monk came to Ummon and asked to be enlightened, upon the above remark by Gensha. Ummon ordered him first to salute him in the formal way. When the monk stood up after prostrating himself on the ground, Ummon pushed him with his stick, and the monk stepped back. The master said, “You are not blind, then.” He now told the monk to come forward, which he did. The master said, “You are not deaf, then” He finally asked the monk if he understood what all this was about and the latter replied, “No, sir.” Ummon then concluded, “You are not dumb, then.”
With all these comments and gestures, are we still travelling through a “terra Incognita?” If so, there is no other way but to go back and repeat this stanza :
“Empty- handed I go, and behold the spade is
In my hands;
I walk on foot, and yet on the back of an ox
I am riding.”
A few more words. The reason why Zen is so vehement in its attack on logic and why the present work treats first of the illogical aspect of Zen, is that logic has so pervasively entered into life as to make most of us conclude that logic is life and without it life has no significance. The map of life has been so definitely and so thoroughly delineated by logic that what we have to do is simply to follow it, and that we ought not to think of violating the laws of thought, which are final. Such a general view of life has come to be held by most people, though I must say they think inviolable. That is so say, they are holding a spade and yet not holding it, They are making the sum of two and two, sometimes three, sometimes five; only they are not conscious of this fact and imagine that their lives are logically or mathematically regulated. Zen wishes to storm the citadel of topsy-turvydom and to show that we live psychologically or biologically and not logically.
In logic there is a trace of effort and pain; logic is self conscious. So is ethics, which is the application of logic to the facts of life. An ethical man performs acts of service which are praiseworthy, but he is all the time conscious of them, and, moreover, he may often be thinking of some future reward. Hence we should say that his mind is tainted and not at all pure, however objectively or socially good his deeds are. Zen abhors this, Life is an art and like perfect art it should be self forgetting; there ought not to be any trace of effort or painful feeling. Life, according to Zen, ought to be lived as a bird flies through the air or as a fish swims in the water. As soon as there are signs of elaboration, a man is doomed, is no more a free being. You are not living as you ought to live, you are suffering under the tyranny of circumstances; you are feeling a constraint of some sort, and you lose your independence. Zen aims at preserving your vitality, your native freedom and above all the completeness of your being. In other words, Zen wants to live from within. Not to be bound by the rules, but to be creating one’s own rules- this is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live. Hence its illogical or rather superlogical statements.
