Language Rocks!

In my post “The Zen of Communication, Part 2“, I wrote about a fellow who said “hello” as he passed me on his walk. About that encounter, I wrote “I’ve had this simple, spontaneous thing happen to me many times, but every time it happens, it reinforces to me the beauty of friendly connectivity and communication between people.”

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It’s pointless me writing a treatise on Zen. There are plenty of ways for you to read up on it if you’re so inclined. However, I’m going to write about it anyway, and how its ethos can open up our ideas on how we can learn more about ourselves, life, and the marvelous way that ideas are communicated.

Zen Buddhism doesn’t have any formal sacred texts. It has no equivalent of the Bible or Qur’an. So how do Zen Buddhists learn? Well, Zen is about experience.

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What is Zen? Zen is a branch of Buddhism that combines spiritual philosophy with living life in a natural and spontaneous way. In what way does an ancient spiritual philosophy relate to modern written communication? Well, let’s explore how…

Why do, or should, we write? Well, we write to communicate ideas. OK, so why not just talk to someone face to face? Answer: it’s not always possible, the main reason is geographical location.  The written word circumvents this.

The written word not only makes it possible for us to write a letter, e-mail, text, or internet content, it lasts longer than the spoken word. For sure, “words are dodgy things”, as they can be misinterpreted and taken out of context, but the written word is historically more reliable than the spoken word, partly because it can be referenced from source material.

It’s up to historians and keen amateurs to offer interpretations of meaning. Letters and documents hundreds of years old still exist today in personal and national archives and libraries. They are studied by scholars and the layman day-in, day-out. Every word is pored over and analysed for meaning and intent. If the Internet Archive is anything to go by, doesn’t this mean that every word we write for the internet or any other print medium carries significant weight, not only for the present but for posterity? Of course it does.

So where does Zen come in (what does it mean anyway?) and how does an ancient philosophy fit in with writing in the 21st century…?

“See it all, till tomorrow”