I am a Zen Monk, always crumbling with discursive questioning Minds;

 
Should we remain agnostic about the role of cognition? Is the human act voluntary, intentional, or mentally representative? Can the meaning or truth-evaluability of Zen Poetry (ZP) be elucidated by Cognitive Literary Criticism more convincingly? Do ZP’s present mental states have both an action component (the expressing) and a linguistic component (the representation)? Should ZP determine certain kinds of better referential communication for better spiritual Enlightenment, which is innately different from other poetry? Does ZP have its own beliefs, desires, and rationality in its poetics? Does ZP have its own effective poetic power on the readers’ behaviours? Does ZP call for new cognitive effects on general epistemic states or minds? Does ZP depend on symbolic communication systems or other rhetorical means? 

Which aspects of mind does ZP stress more favorably among the cognitive, the affective, and the conative?  Can we say simply that if ZP focuses on cognitive aspects, it majorly displays the intellectual process of certain poetic ideas, i.e. knowledge-finding, that if it focuses on affective aspects, it reveals the literary communicability of certain poetic emotions, and that if it tries to focus on conative aspects, it should display more ethical quality rather than just literary activities? Or, it is the total combination of all three different aspects of them? Should ZP be confined to the literary area or more expanded to the enlightenment-accomplishing process?

Zen poetry is usually said to be a peculiar literary product to finally symbolize a Zen master’s enlightenment state, which defies an easy intellectual understanding. This thesis is to explore its enigmatic cognitive, affective, and conative contents. 

Traditionally, philosophy has conducted its study on the mental activities similar to Zen practice. All the philosophers, regardless of Eastern or Western ones, have understood the existence of conation, which emphasizes the willful acting positivity over knowing and believing. In the contemporary times, the positivists tend to measure up, materialize, and objectify these mental elements scientifically and practically. This positivistic approach to the mystic cognitions of human mind can be focused on Cognitive Science (CS).  

This mental state of conation is a dynamic process, defying exact descriptions and experiments. In the past several decades, brain science and neuro-science have scientifically proved the dynamic process of human wills and their specific phenomenal consciousness, naturally somewhat cognitively construing the mysteries of Zen mentality, as part of academic disciplines. However, such mental processes have been known as unknowable enigmas of human volition and will, which is the counter-points of intelligence and emotion, as a third party of all the triad elements of human mind.  

The human mind, especially literary mind, can show some “recursive thinkings” in its literary representations. If I can understand such a mental representation as Zen’s philosophical mind, I can sort all the meditative phenomenal consciousness into cognitive instances and non-instances, which is a process of structuring and categorizing their phenomenal consciousness in Zen poetics. This approach is to constitute, distribute, or abstract the conceptual information of all related philosophical instances in Zen poetry and its practice. 

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