Direction to pond ♾️

The old pond
A frog jumps in
Sound of water.

Bashō (1644-94)

The Buddhist way of being is that all phenomena index not as nouns, but verbs, making things dynamic, ever-changing processes, a constant flow of transformation and change. In the words of D.T. Suzuki, “Buddhists have conceived an object as an event and not as a thing or substance… The Buddhist conception of ‘things’ as samskara (sankhara: happening, deed, act), makes it clear that Buddhists understand our experience in terms of time and movement."  By the way of zen koans and mischievous tales which poke at humanity’s project of self-cleverness and self- idealism, zen indexes what is by pointing at what is not. The paradigm of signification is rendered “impossible,” according to Roland Barthes. “The whole of zen wages a war against the prevarication of meaning,” he wrote in Empire of Signs, “... so as to make mockery of the paradigm and the mechanical character of meaning all the more apparent." Of reality, it is sincere, but not serious. Instead of provoking language, we suspend its seriousness altogether, as practiced by Zen Master Basho (1644-1694), a famous Haiku virtuoso of the Edo period. According to Barthes, Basho’s wakening to the truth of Zen upon hearing the croak of a frog in the pond had not been caused by a motif of illumination, or a superpassing of meaning-making: rather, language is suspended by silence, a stillpoint on the pond.