Zen is a rug.

We had a really interesting conversation at our weekly Black Mountain Zen online discussion last night.

The topic was “Is Zen a religion?”.
People expressed views on both sides of the argument and topics such as divinity, and faith, and the structure of practice, and whether there is any difference between Zen and Buddhism were all discussed.

Of course there is no God worshiped in zen.
If I had to put it simply: zen is a discipline to facilitate ‘waking up’ and then it is the expression of that wakefulness.

But is it a religion?
I don’t know. I really don’t know (and as the zen saying goes, not knowing is most intimate). But words such as sacred, and mystery and faith and the power of something other all sit comfortably within my own practice experience.

It reminded me of a saying I had heard: Religion is a blanket that we throw over the great mystery to give it shape.

I really liked that, and I did a quick search to find out who said it. Turns out it is attributed to the once Roadie manager for AC/DC, Barry Taylor. The actual quote is:

“God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.”

Cool. And I love that it breaks my stereotypes about Roadies.

And if what he says is so, then perhaps Zen is the name of the rug that we pull out from under ourselves to collapse any mysterious shapes. Including Zen itself.

In an interview Barry talked about his initial interest in God.

You reach a point where the way you are, or the way you act, is worrying to yourself. I wanted to be a different kind of person, and I began to look for another way of being. I wanted to be a better human being. It was never my intention to find God. I was trying be a human being who likes himself a bit better. My first return was to philosophy – reading philosophy and realising that a lot of philosophy, particularly 19th century philosophy, was a dialogue for or against religion. I hadn’t any feelings about religion other than that I didn’t like it, I’d rejected it, because I grew up in a fairly left-wing family where there was no religion apart from my grandmother’s church attendance and religious education at school. I had all of these concepts about God that gave me this, ‘I don’t believe in God’ kind of thing, but I’d never actually thought about it. That’s how I began. I thought, ‘If philosophy is dealing with this sense of otherness, interacting or denying religion – what do I think about religion?’ That’s how the whole journey started.”

— Attribution.

In the end we inserted our question into what is known as the tetralemma , a device used by the Buddhist sage and philospher Nagarjuna (more on this here) for jumping outside our discursive ideas.

We end up with this….