ZEN BUDDHISM AND GENERAL SEMANTICS

[And this is contrasted with] the world of words, your verbal world of names, symbols, labels, opinions, assumptions, categories, values, beliefs, etc. General semantics and Zen Buddhism also share the belief "that the world of abstraction is an 'illusion'; that even the object world of concrete phenomena is an 'illusion' of abstraction"; they do not seek to escape this "illusion" but to penetrate it. The common people of cultures outside the Indo-European linguistic group [are not] locked as we are within the symmetrical patterns of aristotelian logic. (p.44) The emergence of Zen in the West I believe has had to accommodate the effects of Western culture, and I think general semantics can aid in bridging the current state of Western culture and the practice of Zen Buddhism.