the story of Zen founder Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu. The emperor was a benevolent Buddhist who built many temples and monasteries throughout China. When the great teacher Bodhidharma came to visit, Emperor Wu asked “What merit is there in all my good works?” Bodhidharma replied, “None whatsoever.” Puzzled, the Emperor asked, “What then is the primal meaning of reality?” “Emptiness,” the teacher answered. “But if it is emptiness, who then am I talking to?” cried Emperor Wu. Bodhidharma shrugged and answered “I do not know,” and seeing that the Emperor was speechless, walked away (McRae). Here we see the dissolution of the subject himself through the self-referential nature of language. “Each ‘thing’ opens itself up to the infinity of predicates through which it passes, as it loses its center, that is, its identity as concept or as self” (Deleuze 174). The myriad forms fold in upon each other, stripped of meaning.

The fourth dimension of the proposition is sense. “The Stoics discovered it along with the event: sense, the expressed of the proposition, in an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition.” The Stoics were masters of paradox, especially Zeno. They even had their own esoteric vocabulary. Sextus Empiricus tells us that the Stoic had a word completely stripped of meaning, “Blituri,” which was employed with its correlate “Skindapsos.” Strictly speaking, skindapsos was the word for a four-stringed lyre. While, blituri is an oenomanopea for the strumming of the strings. But, in the Stoic use, it is applied as a blanket term for any combination of series (or strings) and the corresponding event produced by this combination. “The blank word is designated by esoteric words in general. The function of the blank word, or of the esoteric words of the first order, is to correlate the two heterogeneous series( Deleuze 67).

Zen also has a blank word, Mu (Wu in Chinese). Roughly translated it can mean “no”, “none”, or “without”. It can be used as a response when the question itself is wrong and thus cannot have a definitive answer. The Rinzai school of Zen uses the following koan as their initiation. A monk asked Joshu: “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Joshu answered “Mu”. Early Buddhist thinkers conjectured extensively on whether animals had Buddha-nature, so if Joshu answered “no”, then he would be denying their wisdom, while if he answered “yes” he would seem to obey their dogma. Joshu’s answer signifies that the question, which demands that one take a position on a rather arbitrary matter, is itself a delusion (Mamon). More recently, Discordians, a quasi-parodic modern religious movement, sometimes labeled “Zen for roundeyes”, used Mu as the appropriate response for the loaded question “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

These blank words also extend into portmanteau combinations. Take for example the notion of We-wei, typically translated as “action without action”. This is not to say wu-wei is idleness. Instead, it’s a sort of preconceptualized, primordial action that comes directly from the will, without being turned around in the intellect. There is also the notion of Mu-shin, or No-mind. Again, this is not a purely negative indication a somnambulant, crazy or zombie-like awareness. Instead, it is a free and fluid mind, that it not preoccupied by thought and emotion. It is not relaxed or sleepy, but working very fast, as it has less mental preoccupations. It is the mental state hightly trained martial artists are said to enter right before battle. “Esoteric words, in turn, may also be designated by portmanteau words, of the second order, whose function is to ramify the series (Deleuze 67). The contradictions often stem from the misunderstanding of the negation of negation to mean the same as the original affirmative statement. But this is of the same class of mistake as taking an undead zombie to be a regular living human being.

Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense
John McRae, The Antecedents of Encounter Dialogue in Chense Ch’an Budhism
Mumon, The Gateless Gate

The following is attributed to Zen master Ch’ing yuan Wei-hsin of the T’ang Dynasty: “Thirty years ago, before I started studying Zen, I said ‘Mountains are mountains, waters are waters.’ After I found insight as to the truth of Zen, I said ‘Mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters.’ But now, having achieved Satori, I say ‘Mountains are mountains, waters are waters.’

Paradoxical statements in esoteric words and sayings stem from the attempt to use common language to describe uncommon experience. They are not irrational. If we agree that mystical experience is an experience, then it should be possible to talk about it. Take this hypothetical example. There is an island where the inhabitants can only see in black and white, the traditional binary opposition. So, in their language ‘black’ and ‘non-white’ mean the same thing. With this, the language’s capacity for colors can be described as ‘something is either white or non-white’. Now, we have someone on the island that had a mystical experience and saw the color red. He tries to communicate this by saying he saw a thing that was neither white nor non-white. But to the typical inhabitant, this comes off as utter nonsense (BP). “This affirmative synthetic disjunction… consists of the erection of a paradoxical instance, an aleatory point with two uneven faces, which traverses the divergent series as divergent and causes them to resonate through their distance and in their distance. Thus the ideational center of convergence is by nature perpetually decentered, It serves only to affirm divergence, That is why it seemed that an esoteric ex-centric path was opened to us, a path altogether different from the ordinary one.” (Deleuze 175)

Some would object that there is no logical ground for mystical experience. However, technically speaking the statements of a mystic are founded in empirical observation of a trained consciousness. The fact that these experiences may be internal, does not make them inauthentic. It is rather a symptom of an ironic reversal which has taken place over the last century, as pointed out by Adorno in Minima Moralia. It used to be that objective knowledge, meant that which you saw and experienced directly first-hand. Now, objective is that which you believe because others have experienced and studied it for you, while subjective is the realm of faulty imperfect knowledge, somehow disconnected from the world.

“Esoteric language, which in each case represents the subversion, from the ground up, of the ideal language and the dissolution of the one who holds the real language” (Deleuze 140). It is the nature of esoteric words to disrupt the existing order, because that order is inherently man-made, imperfect and impermanent. The Zen master uses language to show and break its limits.

Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense
Henk Barendregt, Buddhist Phenomenology