zen

Brueghel's peasants do not yet teach Zen. We suspect this set of lessons, in this form, derives from the rise of the commodity system through the late Nineteenth Century.

(The centralised dissemination of social instruction by the church replaced by a more diffuse form of instruction via the capitalist system)

All this in Zen: the staged object lesson (teaching as symptom or parlour game demonstration), with its leisure and its mystery, all this reflects, maybe too much, the experience of windowshopping. It's mirroring, perhaps, a situation where commodities invite pretexts (seemingly), any pretexts, for their existance, rather than pretexts preceding the purchase of commodites. And as such we're unsure as to whether we're getting the authentic Zen, or if rather it's a broken-off piece of the overall superstructure, fused with ideas from books and simply rebranded: Zen.