Irish Zen

In a piece about Dublin's new Samuel Beckett Bridge, I came across this line of Beckett's:


"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness"

There's a fine piece of Irish Zen fo you.

It resounded, in a suitably empty way, with words I then found in Taizan Maezumi's book Teaching of the Great Mountain. The line that struck me followed on from Maezumi's consideration of some last words of the Buddha, after near fifty years of post-enlightenment teaching: 'I've never said a word.'

As I work to penetrate the wordless essence of Zen, here's the line that has most struck me:

'We shouldn't limit our life to what we think it is.'