Zen places such weight on direct experience because it understands awakening as a living, non-conceptual realization rather than an intellectual conclusion. The Buddha’s own enlightenment is taken as a model: a wordless seeing of reality that cannot be reduced to doctrines or arguments. From this perspective, the task is to “see one’s true nature,” not merely to understand descriptions of it. Scriptures may describe the path, but they cannot substitute for the actual transformation of perception and being that Zen calls awakening.

Underlying this is a deep suspicion of the limits of language and conceptual thought. Ultimate reality—emptiness, suchness, Buddha-nature—is held to transcend any formulation in words, which can easily harden into fixed views. Texts are likened to fingers pointing at the moon: useful for indicating direction, but not to be mistaken for the moon itself. When clung to, even the most profound teachings can become subtle forms of attachment, reinforcing the very ego and conceptual habits that practice is meant to dissolve.

Zen therefore presents itself as a “special transmission outside the scriptures,” “not relying on words and letters,” that “points directly to the human mind” and leads to “seeing one’s nature and becoming Buddha.” This transmission unfolds through meditation, direct insight, and the living encounter with a teacher, rather than through the accumulation of doctrinal knowledge. Zazen, mindfulness in daily activities, and, in some schools, kōan practice are treated as the crucible in which delusion is actually uprooted. Intellectual understanding of ideas such as non-self or emptiness, by contrast, can remain purely theoretical, leaving underlying patterns of grasping untouched.

Scriptures are not rejected; many Zen masters are portrayed as deeply versed in them. Yet texts are treated as skillful means rather than ultimate authorities, always secondary to what can be verified in one’s own experience. The emphasis falls on awakening in the midst of ordinary life—eating, walking, working—so that realization is not confined to study or discourse. By continually directing attention back to immediate experience, Zen seeks to free practitioners from dependence on secondhand interpretations and to open the possibility of a direct, unmediated encounter with reality itself.