salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves. - Alan Watts

Indeed, whoever imagines he has explained Zen has in fact only explained it away; it can no more be bound by a definition than the wind can be shut in a box without ceasing to be wind. Thus any attempt to write on Zen may seem an absurdity from the beginning, but that is only so if either reader or writer imagines that Zen can be contained in a set of ideas. A book about London is in no sense London itself, and no sane person would dream of thinking that it is. Yet apparently intelligent people often make the equally ridiculous mistake of identifying a philosophical system, a dogma, a creed, with Ultimate Truth, imagining that they have found that Truth embraced in a set of propositions which appeals to their reason.

[T]he less I preach, the more likely I am to be heard.

Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be intelligible in this sense is to want it to be something other than life.