Understandings
Contrived versus Experienced

Reasoned understanding does not
Hold a candle to one experienced

Reasoned (or read) understanding
Is all too shallow, too artificial

  Too contrived
  Too guessed
  Too assumed
  Too trusted

Too un-experienced
Too clung to

I read a lot. I read an awful lot.

Slowly but surely I am arriving at the destination (i.e. conclusion) that I read too much. Far too much. I am stuffing my analytical mind to the brim with words and words and more and more words in an effort (futile, I am now seeing) to align them all and synchronize them all and so understand them all and with that understand it all. By “it all” I mean everything, the ultimate Knowing, some call it Sunyata, Emptiness.

But there are so many, many factors, none of which, in retrospect, I find too assuring or comforting. For one, there are too many gurus; i.e. too many takers on and interpreters of what actually goes on here, each one of which seems or proclaims to be absolutely certain—listen to me, listen to me.

For two, who can you, ultimately, trust? Have the gurus, monks, those holy ones in print and whom I have read and still read truly experienced the truth, or are they, just like me, surmising—even if brilliantly? Another word for surmising, sad to say, is contriving.

Addressing this issue, the Buddha Gotama often resorted to the analogy of the difference between hearing the taste of a mango described and of actually tasting a mango. No matter how brilliant the words used to describe the sweetness and subtle tanginess and generous juiciness of the mango, they will never even approach the experience of tasting one. Description and experience are two different and separate universes, and there are no doors or bridges connecting them.

None. If you find one, rest assured: it’s an illusion.

Read all you want about mangos, surmise all you want about their taste, and contrive via imagined tastebuds how you would react to biting into one but you’re still on the near side of the wall separating the two universes. You, really, don’t know what a mango tastes like.

Read all you want about Karma, Nirvana, Buddha Nature, and about Emptiness, and no matter how well the words might align and agree, and no matter how beautiful the word-edifice you construct in your imagination, you are still helplessly stranded this side of the river separating reason and experience. You can only surmise the other shore.

I often read that those who have crossed the river and landed on the far shore remain mum about it. At times I have wondered why, why not sing to the sun, moon, and the stars about it and scatter your poems across this earth? But now I see: those who truly arrive are loathed to denigrate the experience of arriving by soiling it with striving-towards-but-never-arriving words.

No song, no poem, no explanation will ever even approach the true experience of Nirvana, of arriving—should I ever, I can easily see myself vanishing into the forest and singing my praises through silence.

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