ZEN

By Zen we mean precisely the quest for direct and pure experience on a metaphysical level, liberated from verbal formulas and linguistic preconceptions.

(ZBA 44)

Zen implies a breakthrough, an explosive liberation from one-dimensional conformism, a recovery of unity which is not the suppression of opposites but a simplicity beyond opposites.

(ZBA 140)

What Zen communicates is an awareness that is potentially already there but is not conscious of itself. Zen is then not Kerygma but realization, not revelation but consciousness, not news from the Father who sends His Son into the world, but awareness of the ontological ground of our own being here and now, right in the midst of the world.

(ZBA 47)

Any attempt to handle Zen in theological language is bound to miss the point.

(ZBA 139)

We must admit it is perfectly logical to admit, with the Zen Masters, that “Zen teaches nothing.”

(ZBA 47)

Zen is outside all particular structures and distinct forms . . . it is neither opposed to them nor not-opposed to them. It neither denies them nor affirms them, loves them nor hates them, rejects them nor desires them. Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, trans-formed consciousness.

(ZBA 4)

Zen cannot be grasped as long as one remains passively conformed to any cultural or social imperatives, whether ideological, sociological, or what have you.

(ZBA 140, italics Merton’s)

[Zen] is nondoctrinal, concrete, direct, existential, and seeks above all to come to grips with life itself, not with ideas about life, still less with party platforms in politics, religion, science, or anything else.

(ZBA 32)

The Zen experience is a direct grasp of the unity of the invisible and the visible, the noumenal and the phenomenal . . . an experiential realization that any such division is bound to be pure imagination.

(ZBA 37, italics Merton’s)

The first and most elementary fact about Zen is its abhorrence of this dualistic division between matter and spirit.

(MZM 13)

Zen is a way of insight rather than a way of “salvation.”

(MZM 247)

“The whole system of Zen . . . may thus be said to be nothing but a series of attempts to set us free from all forms of bondage.”

(MZM 222, quoting D. T. Suzuki)