Apparently the master wants to get across the idea that an enlightened
state is one where the borderlines between the self and the rest of the
universe are dissolved. This would truly be the end of dualism, for as he
says, there is no system left which has any desire for perception. But what is
that state, if not death? How can a live human being dissolve the border-
lines between himself and the outside world?Zen and TumboIiaThe Zen monk Bassui wrote a letter to one of his disciples who was about to
die, and in it he said: "Your end which is endless is as a snowflake dissolving
in the pure air." The snowflake, which was once very much a discernible
subsystem of the universe, now dissolves into the larger system which once
held it. Though it is no longer present as a distinct subsystem, its essence is
somehow still present, and will remain so. It floats in Tumbolia, along with
hiccups that are not being hiccuped and characters in stories that are not
being read ... That is how I understand Bassui's message.
Zen recognizes its own limitations, just as mathematicians have learned
to recognize the limitations of the axiomatic method as a method for
attaining truth. This does not mean that Zen has an answer to what lies
beyond Zen any more than mathematicians have a clear understanding of
the forms of valid reasoning which lie outside of formalization. One of the
clearest Zen statements about the borderlines of Zen is given in the follow-
ing strange koan, very much in the spirit of Nansen:^10T6zan said to his monks, "You monks should know there is an even higher
understanding in Buddhism." A monk stepped forward and asked, "What is
the higher Buddhism?" T6zan answered, "It is not Buddha."There is always further to go; enlightenment is not the end-all of Zen.
And there is no recipe which tells how to transcend Zen; the only thing one
can rely on for sure is that Buddha is not the way. Zen is a system and
cannot be its own metasystem; there is always something outside of Zen,
which cannot be fully understood or described within Zen.Escher and ZenIn questioning perception and posing absurd answerless riddles, Zen has
company, in the person of M. C. Escher. Consider Day and Night (Fig. 49), a
masterpiece of "positive and negative interwoven" (in the words of Mu-
mon). One might ask, "Are those really birds, or are they really fields? Is
it really night, or day?" Yet we all know there is no point to such questions.
The picture, like a Zen koan, is trying to break the mind of logic. Escher
also delights in setting up contradictory pictures, such as Another World
Murnon and G6del 255