Mountains and Rivers

"Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.
During enlightenment, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers.
After enlightenment, mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers."

~ Zen Koan

 

I have a fondness for Zen koans. Cynics will suggest that this is the foolishness of the man who mistakes his own failure to find meaning for the presence of profundity; or perhaps that it is the foolishness of the man who professes profundity in the exhibition of his own emptiness. To these, I remark that there are worse things than being a Fool; and they, I'm sure, shake their heads in disgust and go on. They do not want to be taught by me.

It is very important to understand, before we go further, that I do not wish to teach, either. I wish to express, and it is possible that what you gain from your willed interaction with that expression manifests to you as learning, but that is not my purpose. More: it is not within my power. I cannot teach you, because the tao that can be taught is not the Tao. I can only be.

I'm sure this sounds very pretentious. It's difficult to find the right place to start with this... expression. There is what the late Douglas Adams, through the able mouthpiece of Dirk Gently, referred to as the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things (which I abbreviate to FIAT; Latinists or Liverpudlians among you may appreciate the happy accident of the acronym) - we'll be returning to this, insofar as we ever really leave it, which, when you come to consider it, is difficult to do without abdicating the Dasein - that both reassures and confounds one in the effort to find a starting place. The temptation to evoke a Joycean solution is strong, and the slew of references that will, I suspect, flavor if not pepper this treatise and the ones that follow is perhaps evidence that this temptation was not wholly resisted.

If you're confused, please take that as an indication that I haven't begun to properly express myself yet. Imagine this series of writings as a Seurat painting in progress - at present, the dots are disconnected, and you are still too close. But the day will dawn when there is a sufficient proliferation of them, and you are sufficiently distant, when you can look upon them with older and newer eyes, and see what has been made. Persevere, I urge you.