By Lakshmi
I don’t know if any of you have heard of a dog named Bunny—the one who learned
more than a hundred words by pressing buttons.
After learning all that vocabulary, Bunny started asking, “What is dog?” and later, “Why
dog?”
People started to feel that the dog was having existential angst. But I wondered if dogs
even experience identity that way. Maybe they know identity through smell. Or through
pack identity. For Bunny, “dog” may have just been a label—something humans use, not
something that defines lived experience.
The Weight of Words
I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but words feel increasingly loaded. You can be having a normal conversation, and then a single word can derail everything. Before you know it, you’re defending the semantics of that one word rather than the actual content of what you were trying to say.
This lines up closely with a Buddhist insight: words are inherently inadequate. A single word or phrase simply can’t convey the vast richness of experience, intention, or feeling. That’s why we so often misunderstand each other.
Words are just labels. A tree is only a “tree” because we’ve collectively agreed to call it that. From Buddhist and Hindu perspectives, words also carry karmic energy. They can reinforce attachment—me, mine—or instantly create judgment: good, bad, right, wrong.
Language always evolves, and some words today activate our emotions almost instantly. They can even be weaponized—incidentally, another word that has been coined more recently. Words like gaslighting or narcissistic. Some are genuinely useful—performative, for example. Performing can be authentic, but being performative is identification with the ego.
Breaking the Conceptual Mind
Zen koans try to break the conceptual mind, encouraging you to start listening to just the sounds rather than the meaning of the words.
There’s a parallel to this in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), an intervention called word translation. You take a charged thought and translate it into another language. The meaning stays the same, but the emotional impact drops away. Suddenly it’s just sound.
Let’s try this with Google Translate. “You are wrong!” is heavy.
But listen to this in Danish:
“Du tager fejl!”
The impact is less. It’s softer.
A Practice for the Day
Here is a mindfulness practice you can try throughout your day: noting.
Note sensations: cold, hot.
Note feelings: calm, frustrated.
Note actions: sitting, eating, talking.
Just pay attention to the sound of the word.
And definitely, in conversations, try noticing how you choose your words and the impact they have.
Śūnyatā (Emptiness)
One of the most misunderstood words is perhaps a concept in Buddhism – emptiness. When Western thinkers—and even Hindu philosophers—first encountered the word, derived from the Sanskrit śūnya, meaning “void,” they were alarmed. It sounded life-denying, even nihilistic.
But as philosopher Eckhart Tolle noted, it was just a pointer—a pointer to a truth that is unknowable through words.
The Vast and Indescribable Nature of Experience
I would like to conclude with this excerpt from the book “This Extraordinary Moment” by John Astin, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and a philosopher:
“Experience does not come with a label or a name tag pinned to its lapel announcing what it is. The dance of light and color in the evening sky does not say, ‘I am a sunset.’ The clear, sparkling liquid racing down the mountainside doesn’t announce to us, ‘I’m a river.’ No, it is we who supply the labels.
Experience arrives as it is, presenting its various qualities, characteristics, attributes, and textures. And those very qualities that make up what we call experience also come with no narrative attached. They arrive naked and unadorned by any ideas we might entertain about them.”
Maybe Bunny doesn’t need the words at all—only experience, as it already is.
Hakone Zendo 