Why Zen (Chan - 禪) Buddhism Refuses to Explain Itself - Even When Science Tries
禪 (Chan / Zen) Buddhism (now referred to as Zen in this post for simplicity) is a tradition of Buddhist practice often associated with meditation, but it is not defined by meditation alone. While Zen practitioners do meditate, the practice is not aimed at relaxation, self-improvement, or achieving special mental states. Instead, meditation is used to directly observe how the mind creates habits of thought, identity, and reaction. Zen emphasizes direct experience over belief or doctrine, using simple, paradoxical teachings to prevent concepts from replacing insight. Ultimately, Zen is not about being calm while sitting, but about seeing clearly and responding appropriately in everyday life—whether sitting, walking, working, or speaking.
Zen has never been opposed to knowledge.
It has simply been uninterested in explanation when explanation stands in for seeing.
That difference is easy to overlook in a culture trained to assume that understanding arrives through description—through models, diagrams, ever finer measurements. When neuroscience enters the discussion, mapping attention, self-reference, altered states, it can feel as though Zen has finally been decoded. As if the last opaque corner has yielded. Zen does not resist explanation out of fear of being disproven. It resists because explanation moves in the wrong direction.
James H. Austin’s Zen and the Brain sits directly in this tension. The work is careful, rigorous, and unusually respectful of both Zen practice and neurological science. As it traces neural correlates of meditation, insight, and self-dissolution, it repeatedly encounters a limit: the point where explanation no longer sharpens perception and begins to blur what Zen points toward.
That limit is not a failure of science.
It is intrinsic to Zen.
Explanation Moves Outward; Zen Turns Inward
Explanation adds structure.
Zen removes it.
Scientific inquiry depends on framing—variables, mechanisms, causal chains. This is its strength. Zen practice is not concerned with producing a better model of mind. It interrupts the habit of modeling itself.
Zen texts make little effort to cooperate. Questions are met with silence, gestures, contradictions, ordinary remarks. Not from naivety, but from recognition: the impulse to explain is the same impulse that keeps the self intact at the center of experience.
Austin describes how the sense of a personal self is assembled through distributed neural processes—memory, narrative, valuation, emotional tagging. Sustained attention without an object destabilizes these processes. Zen does not respond by offering a replacement explanation. It does not announce a truer self hidden behind illusion. It removes the scaffolding and leaves nothing standing where certainty expects support.
Explanation wants to claim insight.
Zen lets it drop
.
Science as Tool, Not Authority
Zen has never rejected empirical investigation. Historically it has been pragmatic, observational, unsentimental. What it refuses is authority that presents itself as final.
Neuroscience can show what shifts during meditation: attentional networks reconfigure, limbic reactivity changes, default mode activity loosens. These findings matter. They can dispel fantasy. They can prevent harm by clarifying why fear, disorientation, or destabilization sometimes appear.
What Zen does not grant science is interpretive authority over awakening. For the same reason it does not grant that authority to scripture or philosophy. None of these are lived.
Austin is precise about this. Throughout Zen and the Brain, he returns to the same restraint: neural correlates are not causes, explanations are not experiences, descriptions do not replace practice. The brain can be examined. Awakening is not an object inside it.
Zen does not oppose science.
It does not submit to it.
Science is a map. Zen is what is left when maps are set aside.
Why Mystery Is Preserved, Not Solved
Contemporary spiritual culture often treats mystery as a flaw to be corrected. Clarity is expected to reassure. Insight is expected to soothe. Understanding is expected to feel safe.
Zen does not share this expectation.
Mystery is preserved as discipline, not romance. The refusal to explain protects against premature closure—the mind’s habit of settling for conceptual certainty instead of direct encounter. Zen recognizes that the urge to resolve ambiguity is the same urge that quietly rebuilds the self.
Austin documents how insight can arrive abruptly, without preparation, and how it often unsettles rather than calms. Familiar reference points dissolve. Meaning reorganizes before language has footing. Zen does not rush to clarify these moments. Explanation would tame them too quickly.
To explain is to stabilize.
Zen destabilizes so that something prior can be noticed.
This is why Zen stories end without warning. Why koans resist interpretation. Why teachers decline to confirm what students think they have grasped. The mystery is not there for admiration. It is there to prevent reclamation
.
The Cost of Explanation
There is a risk in translating Zen too smoothly into neuroscience. Practice can turn into optimization. Insight can become an achievement.
If awakening is framed as a brain state, it becomes something to acquire or maintain. If reduced to neural signatures, the project of self-improvement slips back in, even while claiming to have moved beyond self.
Zen avoids this by offering no guarantees. It promises no peace, no clarity, no transformation. It offers practice. Nothing more.
Austin’s work matters because it does not abandon this restraint. Even while engaging deeply with neuroscience, it returns to the same humility: what can be measured is not what matters most; what matters most cannot be held.
Zen refuses to explain itself because explanation implies ownership.
Zen leaves nothing to own.
What Remains
When explanation falls away, what remains is not an answer. It is function.
Attention without grasping.
Action without reference to identity.
Clarity without commentary.
Science can examine the conditions under which these appear. Zen asks only whether they are present.
This is not anti-intellectual.
It is anti-substitution.
Zen does not reject explanation because it is false.
It rejects explanation because it is never sufficient.
And it knows—long before neuroscience—that the deepest shifts occur not when the mind finally understands, but when it stops insisting that it must.
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