The Word is not the Thing

The Word is not the Thing

During the couple of years that I lived at a Zen retreat, I was sometimes amused at the difficulty some practitioners had in distinguishing the Zen precepts from the overlapping Japanese culture. Illustrative of this: While the principles of Zen Buddhism have no necessary relationship to a steady diet of brown rice eaten from a bowl with chopsticks, on the few occasions when someone prepared pancakes for breakfast, our Jikido (sangha director) insisted that we eat them out of a bowl—with chopsticks. And so it is, likewise, with the teachings concerning advaita: some people exhibit confusion between what are the nondual teachings and what are Hindu cultural (or even superstitious) expressions. The point is: you do not have to know a single thing about India, or its traditional belief systems and mythologies, in order to come to a realization of your own true nature. Fortunately for many seekers in the West today, there are Self-realized teachers who are capable of winnowing the wheat from the chaff. If you encounter a teacher who can’t make sense in the normal language which we all understand, patiently look elsewhere. “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein