The quintessential zen form is the koan. Stripped of later literary embellishment, the koan is – or at least purports to be – the recording of an actual exchange between two sincere practitioners. And we imagine that one of the characters in the exchange has more wisdom, and they are correcting the other, who has less.
I don’t believe that. I think it is more like a conversation, where one is illuminating the imbalance of the other. But not from a position of balance, but from a position of imbalance. And both positions are part of the great wholeness, which is dynamic because it is imbalanced. And being imbalanced it, like a person, a great person, can walk through time, and neither freeze nor fall.
We can look at the tradition in the same way. Nagarjuna is correcting the imbalance of codification, but in turn creates an imbalance which can veer into nihilism. Chinese Buddhism in response emphasises the dharmakaya, but this can lead to an imbalanced fixation on devotional practice, so is balanced in turn by the imbalance of Zen’s Iconoclasm, and so on, down to this exchange now.
I don’t want you to be balanced. I want you to be completely yourself, in all your imbalance, because if we aspire to balance, then Buddhism will become a prison, a religion. And there will still be walking, obviously, but in samsara, and samsara only.