In what follows, the reader is invited to share the writer’s bewilderment.
Zen enlightenment — satori — is no antithesis of bewilderment, or solution to it, but its culmination. The Zen master’s crazy talk and wild acts twist the pupil’s rational mind into such paroxysms and contortions that at last... at last what? Reason gives up — not in despair or madness but in a burst of light. Revealing what? Nothing. Satori.
The Japanese Zen master who more than anyone sowed Zen seeds in the West is Daisetz T. Suzuki (1870-1966). His English-language classic “Zen and Japanese Culture” (1959) explores Zen and poetry, Zen and painting, Zen and tea ceremony, Zen and swordsmanship, Zen and life, Zen and death. Swordsmanship is deadly combat, but the Zen swordsman is no killer, the death he inflicts no death, the sword he inflicts it with a “sword of no-sword” — meaning, it seems, that nothing is what it seems, nothing is anything at all, at least nothing comprehensible or communicable.