It’s the Moon, Stupid

“When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.”

Sometimes there’s deep truth in simple statements.

In Buddhism, particularly the famous Zen school, they’re fond of using koans like this to deliver powerful meaning. Koans are short stories, usually no more than a few short sentences, that always confuse Westerners because we’re brought up to be very literal-minded. You can’t look at a koan and try to interpret it literally. At least not if you expect to take any meaning from it.

The idea behind the koans is to blast away your conscious orderly thoughts and to reveal the underlying truth of reality to the deeper parts of your mind. Buddhism holds that there’s something of the true Buddha nature in all things; and we have to release our thoughts of the physical world to realize that truth.

The wisdom of a koan comes from the insights that your confused mind reaches once it lets go of the literal and unlearns what it knows.

The above quote is a Buddhist saying, paraphrased from a koan attributed to Nagarjuna, an Indian Buddhist who founded the Mahayana school. Fortunately, and unlike many koans, it has a straightforward interpretation that our regular selves can comprehend.

The signs and symbols and indicators we use to direct us to wisdom should not be confused with the wisdom itself.

This is powerful, and it has layer upon layer of meaning to it. The words we read and the speakers we listen to can only point us in the right direction. They are not the truths in themselves.

You can’t worship authority figures and gurus. Siddharta Gautama, who we all know better as the Buddha himself, was the most critical of his own worshippers:

“Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings – that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.”

You can’t take Madcow’s Intermediate 5×5 and hold it as a sacred unchanging gospel. Madcow’s 5×5 points you at the truth; it is not eight weeks of holiness that can never be changed. Look at the Moon, not the finger.

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

There is no truth and there are no answers.

Stop looking at the finger.