Photo: iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Zen means meditation. That is all. And whenever people ask me “so what is all this Zen stuff about?”, I struggle to give them the answer they are hoping for.

Perhaps Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist and scholar¹ said it best:

Zen seeks the direct, immediate view in which the experience of a subject-object duality is destroyed. That is why Zen resolutely refuses to answer clearly, abstractly, or dogmatically any religious or philosophical question whatever.

Here is a typical example of one of those question-and-answer illustrations of Zen in which the masters deliberately frustrated all attempts of their disciples to slip an abstract doctrine in between the mind and the “this” which was right before their nose:

Someone asked Yakusan, who was sitting in meditation, “What are you doing here?”
He replied, “I am not doing anything.”
“If so, you are sitting in idleness.”
“Sitting in idleness is doing something.”
“You say you are not doing anything, but what is this ‘anything’ that you are not doing?”
“Even the ancient sages know not,” replied Yakusan

1. and someone worth reading if you are interested in the matters of a contemplative life. ↩︎