When Writing About Zen, I Forget Zen
Search for “Zen” on any content platform and you’ll find no shortage of articles promising clarity in five minutes or less. 3 Zen Principles for a Calmer Life. What Zen Can Teach You About Productivity. The Simple Zen Secret to Letting Go. I’d read these and feel a quiet unease — not quite frustration, more like watching someone describe the taste of water.
My concern was that readers, encountering Zen through these summaries, would walk away with something that resembles Zen in shape but contains nothing of its substance. A kind of philosophical taxidermy.
But somewhere in sitting with that unease, I had to be honest with myself.
The people writing those articles aren’t wrong to write them. And the people reading them aren’t wrong to want them. Time is genuinely scarce. Attention is genuinely taxed. If someone walks away with even a small thread of curiosity about Zen — even through a simplified entry point — that’s not nothing. I have no right to stand at the gate and decide who deserves access.
So I’ve let go of the criticism. What I haven’t been able to let go of is the deeper problem.
Zen doesn’t give you the point.
In the Mumonkan — the 13th-century collection of koans I’ve been writing through in this series — a monk asks the master Joshu: Does a dog have Buddha-nature? The answer isn’t yes or no. It’s Mu. A word that dissolves the question rather than resolving it.
Elsewhere, a student asks: What is the Buddha? The master answers: Three pounds of flax. Another asks about the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West. The answer: The cypress tree in the garden.
These responses aren’t riddles with hidden solutions. They’re not being deliberately obscure to seem wise. The master is pointing at something that cannot survive being packaged into a takeaway. The moment you summarize it, you’ve lost it.
This is precisely what makes Zen so resistant to the kind of writing that travels well online. A “key insight” distilled from a koan is, almost by definition, a misreading of the koan.
And yet — I understand why writers try. I do it too. If your answer is too far from the question, the reader doesn’t sit with the distance and let it work on them. They close the tab. So you move closer, you offer a handhold, you give them something they can carry. The surface-level explanation isn’t laziness. It’s a response to a real constraint.
The problem isn’t that these writers are careless. The problem is that Zen and the attention economy are structurally incompatible.
I started SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT partly because I believed dialogue might be a way through this. Not because it solves the problem, but because conversation can hold contradictions in a way that a listicle cannot. When Nicholas asks a blunt question and I fumble toward an answer, when Catherine pushes back and I realize my explanation has already become too neat — something truer happens in that friction than in any clean paragraph I could write alone.
But I’d be lying if I said the format protects me from the same pull.
When I sit down to write, I catch myself calculating. Will this land? Is this too abstract? Should I bring it back to something more relatable? And beneath those practical questions, a less comfortable one: Am I writing this to transmit something, or to be understood? Are those even the same thing?
Sometimes I drift. I reach for a framing that’s more accessible, a metaphor that’s more familiar, an ending that ties things together a little too cleanly. And then I notice that I’ve done exactly what I was worried about — not because I was careless, but because I wanted to be heard.
Zen has a word for the attachment to achieving enlightenment that actually prevents enlightenment. The same logic applies here. The desire to communicate Zen can, if I’m not careful, become the very thing that prevents me from communicating it.
So I come back to the question I can’t fully answer.
SHIBUMIWORKS is not a project that can be measured in followers or claps. That’s not modesty — it’s structural. If the work is doing what I intend, it won’t produce the kind of immediate satisfaction that drives those numbers. The readers it’s meant for will sit quietly with something unresolved, and that’s not an experience people rush to share.
I believe that. I return to it whenever I notice myself drifting.
But then I look at what I’ve just written and I have to ask the question honestly:
Is this essay an attempt to transmit something about Zen — or did I write it because I thought it might earn some claps?
I don’t have a clean answer. And maybe that’s the most honest thing I can offer.