Time Travel Back To Osu
By: Charz
Tags: Again!!, Agein!!, Behaviour, Beyond Reasoning, Cheering Squad, Devotion, Energetically, Friendship, Imamura-san, Koan, Love, Mitsurou Kubo, Osu !, Ouendan, Reason, Roshi, Sein und Zeit, South Kasobu, Sports, Taiko, Time Travel, Transcending Logic, Usami-san, Yankee, Zen
Improving yourself enough to transcend logic,
That is the spirit of “osu !”
Usami-san, leader of the South Kasobu Cheering Squad
The general justification for the refusal or inability of establishment Zen to express itself in ways that are easily accessible to the Western reader is that a central aspect of Zen is (as we shall see) the transcendence of all words and concepts. Indeed, the experience that is Zen consists entirely of transcending or “moving beyond” all conventional ideas, concepts, and words. Because Zen is not about words or the concepts they represent, it is inconceivable that you could use these things to explain it. Given that Zen is predicated upon the opposition to all theoretical or abstract notions, it seems ridiculous to attempt to describle it in such terms. In essence, to produce a set of philosophical propositions that are alleged to “explain” Zen is logically inconsistent with the premises of Zen. To engage in this type of philosophical analysis, it is said, is to miss the point entirely.
Thus proponents of Zen have generally argued that any attempt to discuss the subject must be indirect and suggestive, rather than explicit and analytic. One thus describes Zen in much the same way that one draws a three dimensional object – a cube, say – in the two dimensions of a blackboard : by producing the shadow that the transcendental object throws in the conventional world. A cube transcends the conceptual map of a two-dimensional world, just as the experience of Zen transcends the world of concepts and ideas. Zen literature thus “hints” rather than “tells”, because telling is impossible. The result is that the literature is no more Zen than the blackboard etching is a cube. Both the drawing and the words are poor intimations, i.e., hints, about the things to which they refer.
We begin with the realization that while Zen is beyond logic (because it is beyond all concepts) it is not the case that Zen is an illogical hodgepodge of pseudo-mystical non-sense. To transcend logic is not to be illogical. Rather, it is to see in such a way that logic is no longer necessarily useful. The path toward that understanding may itself be quite orderly and logical. In much the same way, one may logically describe an experience or an activity that may help one to reach the experience or learn how to perform the activity. To use an obvious example, one might learn to skydive in terms of concepts and theories, but to jum is immediately to transcend all the words and ideas about it.
Understanding Zen, Benjamin Radcliff, Amy Radcliff, 1993, Page 5
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