“To put feet on a snake.”
(Zen saying)

That’s what will all do. We feel pity on the snake and its lame walk of convulsive contortions on dusty ground, and we set ourselves to the humanitarian task of fitting little feet on to its body so that it may walk on the floor as any well-behaved animal. See the poor little thing, how it squirms in the dust! Let us get it out of its misery with the generous gesture of the kind-hearted benefactor. You’ll see how grateful it feels when it tries the new displacement system. It will be a joy to see it tread nimbly on its feet in rhythmical pattern. A truly good deed. We can feel proud of it.

That’s what we all do. Adding feet to the snake. Complicating what was simple in itself, putting questions when keeping quiet was the best understanding, searching for explanations when the facts spoke for themselves. Feet on the snake. Forced understanding, intricate methods, twisted logic. We try to be wiser than nature, and submit to logic what was matter for contemplation. Uniformity in all. Let all walk alike. Let all walk as we walk, which is, of course, the best way to walk. We pretend to bring everything under measure, reason, and number. Let everything adjust itself to our way of thinking; let all animals walk on feet. That will be the way for all to understand one another at last.

That will be the way for us never to understand one another. Poor snake! See the trouble it is getting into with its fashionable feet! It is not getting into step. For the snake it was so simple to slide effortlessly on the friendly ground that now it does not know what to do with the awkward jumps of the stumping feet all about the place. The king cobra, which when left to itself could overtake even a strong man in its run, gets now entangled and trips up in the newly-implanted prostheses. Life, that was clear and simple in its direct experience of daily living, becomes now an impossible tangle, a riddle and a mess when we pretend to elucidate it with sophisticated premises from uneasy philosophies. Prayer becomes examination of conscience, religion becomes a syllabus, and God is the conclusion of a syllogism. The snake, in the end, cannot walk at all.

Not that reason is not to be used. Only that it has not to be abused. It is to be used to respect the nature of each being, the crawling of the snake, the intimacy of life, the mystery of God. It has not to be used to impose mathematical patterns on the flights of the spirit. Excessive reasoning drowns out feelings, puts out fervour, dries away devotion. The mind’s lucubrations can hinder the feet’s movements. The snake walks better on its sturdy scales, slippery and intertwined to tackle any ground, that on artificial feet it has no use for. Let us allow it to walk its own way.