As we saw in Part II, Eastern traditions prize silence and mistrust language. Their philosophic utterances are largely apophatic, drawing attention to what is not the case. Much Eastern thought deliberately disrupts conceptual and linguistic thinking, pointing to its limitations: for example, ‘the tao that can be named is not the real tao’. Such disruption could be seen as the whole aim of Zen, if having an overt aim were not in itself to subvert what Zen stands for.
