Why would saying “yes” make you lose your own Buddha-nature?
Because to label a thing is to demarcate a category… thereby verbally overshadowing your experience.
Much of Zen tradition basically consists of tying verbal intelligence in knots to force some non-verbal thinking or experiencing to occur.
The moment where it really hits you that you can’t say yes or no, is the moment where you directly experience the limitations of your verbal reasoning to provide an accurate map of the territory.
The moment, however, that you reduce this back to a verbal summary of the non-verbal experience—for example, this explanation of mine! -- you’ve gone back to the non-Buddha nature: verbally tagging the map of your experiences, rather than being aware of the (untagged, unlabeled) territory.
In effect, koan practice is a way of learning not to trust your brain’s naive reasoning. And GEB had a lot about Zen because it’s sort of like trying to “Godel” or “Escher” out of your own brain’s limitations—to leave its own printed page and join the world of three-dimensions.… even though in the end, even enlightenment is still an illusion.
(A worthwhile illusion, though; it may only be 2.5D, but that’s still .5 more than 2D!)
Because to label a thing is to demarcate a category… thereby verbally overshadowing your experience.
Much of Zen tradition basically consists of tying verbal intelligence in knots to force some non-verbal thinking or experiencing to occur.
The moment where it really hits you that you can’t say yes or no, is the moment where you directly experience the limitations of your verbal reasoning to provide an accurate map of the territory.
The moment, however, that you reduce this back to a verbal summary of the non-verbal experience—for example, this explanation of mine! -- you’ve gone back to the non-Buddha nature: verbally tagging the map of your experiences, rather than being aware of the (untagged, unlabeled) territory.
In effect, koan practice is a way of learning not to trust your brain’s naive reasoning. And GEB had a lot about Zen because it’s sort of like trying to “Godel” or “Escher” out of your own brain’s limitations—to leave its own printed page and join the world of three-dimensions.… even though in the end, even enlightenment is still an illusion.
(A worthwhile illusion, though; it may only be 2.5D, but that’s still .5 more than 2D!)