"Word Masking"

I found another gem of a book entitled "The Essence of Qigong:  A Handbook of Qigong Theory and Practice" by Ke Yun Lu, translated by Lucy Liao. In a discussion of grasping the essence of a teaching, Mr. Lu contrasts conceptualization with experiential feeling. In Buddhism, the term "word masking" means the substitution of words and concepts for an actual experience. The words may make sense logically, but without experiential knowledge, there is only a surface understanding. To illustrate his point, Mr. Lu asked friends to describe the taste of tea. One said that tea has the aroma of a jasmine flower while another said that it has a bitter tinge. He asked further:  How does the first cup in the morning taste? Is it different if one is at leisure? How about when one is happy? There are thousands of ways to describe the taste of tea. However, if you try to describe the taste of tea to someone who had never tried tea before, all the descriptions in the world would be just abstract words, not at all like the experience of drinking tea. The point is that we cannot understand something that we do not know. We do our best with words, but we need to know that the words do not substitute for the experience.

So why do we even try to use words to describe the ineffable? If one has had an experience, perhaps in the distant past, but the memory has become faint, words can help to trigger the memory and re-ignite something that resides deep within. Words are pointing the way but are not the way. 

Mr. Lu states that if we remain with conceptualization of, say, yin and yang, we have not grasped its essence. Rather than an idea, true understanding of yin and yang is an experiential feeling beyond words. He encourages us to break out of the language trap of preconceptions and ideas to experience "the origin of all things." This is the way of the Tao.