Rain Falls

rain falls and water flows through the valley.

For

Those who get caught up (as I did today).

Reference

Alan Watts | The Way of Zen (1957) + In My Own Way (1972).

Image

‘No Stopping’ | 07 | 08| 2022.

Note

Zen literature is littered with this kind of stuff. Give you another one, “… spring comes, and the grass grows by itself”. Zen is an experience that is “simply inaccessible to the purely literary and scholarly approach” (Watts, 1957, x). It has no finite definition. Lies outside of intellectual understanding. The only real way to tap into it is by suggestion, “saying what it is not” (Watts, 1957, p.3).

I read stories of curious cats asking these old monks and masters things like, “master what is the Tao” and getting nothing in response but pointing upwards to the sky and downwards to a water jug. When they press for an explanation they get, “a cloud in the sky and water in the jug”. There is no theorising here. No speculation. It is called ‘direct pointing’. And some attempts at direct pointing are more frustrating and bewildering than others. Which I guess is kinda the idea.