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Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that places great importance on moment-by-moment awareness and ‘seeing deeply into the nature of things’ by direct experience.
An important concept for all Zen sects in East Asia is the notion of Dharma transmission the claim of a line of authority that goes back to the Buddha via the teachings of each successive master to each successive student. This concept relates to the ideas expressed in a description of Zen attributed to Bodhidharma:
- A special transmission outside the scriptures
- No dependence upon words and letters
- Direct pointing to the human mind
- Seeing into one’s own nature and attaining Buddhahood
For Zen attributes to occur the right brain must be engaged and stimulated. The right brain more often than the left generates feeling-states, such as love, humor, or aesthetic appreciation, which are non-logical. They defy the rules of conventional reasoning.
The left brain’s primary functions are opposite and complementary to the right’s. The right side is concerned with Being, the left with Doing. The left brain controls the vital act of willing. Its agent, the right hand, picks berries, throws spears, and fashions tools. The left brain knows the world through its unique form of symbolization-speech. In right-handed people, 90 percent of language skills reside in the left brain hemisphere.
Speech and action are closely related. Words are tools: the very essence of action. We use them to abstract, discriminate, analyze, and dissect the world into pieces, objects, and categories. But speech is not only outer-directed; within the self, words are the implements of thought and manifestation.
Analysis―reducing the components of sentences into their separate parts―is essential to understanding speech, especially if the content of the message concerns objective facts. This key left brain task depends upon linear progression, in contrast to the holistic perception of the right brain.
Speech itself is also abstract and depends upon the left brain’s unique ability to process information without the use of images. The mind arranges words, as children assemble Legos, as image substitutes, building concepts that allow us to think about freedom, economics, and destiny without needing to conjure images for these words. The ability to conceptualize that the abstract words crime, virtue, punishment, and justice are all related is supremely human. To be able to leap from the particular and concrete to the general and abstract has allowed us to create art, logic, science, and philosophy. But this skill tore us out of the rich matrix of nature. The part torn away became the ego. The left brain cut the right brain’s integrated sense of wholeness into a duality that resulted in humans creating a distinction between me-in-here and world-out-there. The ego requires duality to gain perspective. Dualism also enhanced the human affinity for objective thinking, which in turn increased our reasoning skills and eventually led to logic.
On the other hand, the right brain’s feeling-states are authentic. Once a person has experienced love or ecstasy, he or she knows it. An internal voice verifies the experience beyond debate. Feeling-states allow us to have faith in God, to grasp the essence of a joke, to experience patriotic fervor, or to be repulsed by a painting someone else finds beautiful. These states all possess a non-discursive quality. Standing in the shadows of our ancient beginnings, feeling-states overwhelm the brain’s more recently evolved slick facility with words. No crisp nomenclature exists to describe them. When pressed to explain their emotional experiences, people, in exasperation, commonly fall back upon tautology―"It is because it is!" The things one loves, lives, and dies for cannot easily be expressed in words.
Feeling-states do not ordinarily progress in a linear fashion, but are experienced all-at-once. "Getting" the punch line of a joke results in an explosion of laughter. An intuitive insight arrives in a flash. Newton and Einstein both reported examples of what the poet Rilke called "conflagrations of clarity." Love at first sight, such as what Dante experienced when he encountered Beatrice, happens in an instant. Religious conversions, such as the one that overwhelmed Paul on the road to Damascus, strike like lightning.
A feature of nonverbal communication is that no symbolization interferes with the direct appreciation of reality. The right brain perceives the world concretely. For example, a facial expression is "read" without any attempt to translate it into words.
The right brain hemisphere is also the portal leading to the world of the invisible. It is the realm of altered states of consciousness where faith and mystery rule over logic. There is compelling evidence that dreaming occurs primarily in the right brain.
When people find it necessary to express in words an inner experience such as a dream, an emotion, or a complex feeling-state, they resort to a special form of speech called metaphor that is the right brain’s unique contribution to the left brain’s language capability. The word metaphor combines two Greek words, meta which means “over and above”, and pherein, "to bear across”. Metaphors allow one to leap across a gap from one thought to the next. Metaphors have multiple levels of meaning that are perceived simultaneously. They supply a plasticity to language without which communication would often be less interesting, sometimes difficult, and occasionally impossible. The objective world can be described, measured and catalogued, but to communicate an emotion or feeling-state we employ metaphors. To tell another that one’s heart is "soaring like an eagle" or "as cold as ice" reveals the synergy between the right brain’s concrete images and the left brain’s abstract words. Metaphors result in poetry and myth, and are essential to the parables of religion and the wisdom of folktales.
The right brain is also distinguished by its ability to cognate images. It can simultaneously integrate the component parts in the field of vision, synthesizing incongruous elements all-at-once. The human face is the most compound image the right brain must decipher. Fluctuating facial expressions and the infinite variety of human faces adds to the complexity of the task, as does the possibility that the person behind the face is engaging in an act of deception. The right brain takes all these factors into account and usually turns in a virtuoso performance instantly.
The right brain is better than the left in perceiving space and making judgments as to balance, harmony, and the composition of gestalts, from which we make aesthetic distinctions between ugly and beautiful. Since the right hemisphere processes input instantaneously, it is the better side for appreciating dimensions and judging distances. Driving, skiing, surfing and dancing are its territory. The right brain’s principal attributes concern being, images, holism, and music.
To generate feeling-states Zen Buddhists of the Rinzai school practice meditation on koans. A koan (literally "public case") is a story or dialogue. According to one view, a koan embodies a realized principle, or law of reality. Koans often appear paradoxical or as linguistically meaningless dialogues or questions. The answer to the koan involves a transformation of perspective or consciousness, which may be either radical or subtle. They are a tool to allow the student to approach enlightenment by essentially short-circuiting the logical way we order the world or by moving the focus from the analytical left brain into the experiential right brain.
In order to try to answer these often unanswerable problems, the thinker is forced to create new mental pathways. Those pathways then may be useful for other problems, thus producing a "mind expansion" effect. The Zen student’s mastery of a given koan needs to be experienced. The right brain does not speak, yet it actively participates in the comprehension of the spoken word. By listening carefully to the forms of the koan while the left brain is deciphering its content, the right brain is interpreting out the hidden messages.
Since it is virtually impossible to describe how the right side deciphers nonverbal language, most people refer to this skill as “intuition.” Intuition is the Zen feeling-state taught by Zen & the Art of Hammock Riding, all-at-once―instantly! . Enjoy it!
Koan of the Hammock
In its simplicity lays the key to joy itself
It is noble when you create it, and quick at its release
To be complete you must surrender and become enveloped
It is always perfect, the way it was meant to be
Why do I let my left brain be tortured,
when what I need is to allow my right brain to “get” the Zen punch line?
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