Talking about Dharma - is it worthwhile? Discussing the Dharma, as on this site -- looking for and sharing information -- is it really beneficial or could it be a waste of time or even counterproductive?

Several quotes come to mind, e.g. this one from Wumen Huikai:


  The instant you speak about a thing, you miss the mark.


and of course, Fen Yang:


  When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.


From this and other sources (like Chogyam Trungpa's warnings about spiritual materialism) one might conclude that spending time on a site like this could be a path to illusion and a way to develop the subtle "enlightened" ego.

What are the dangers of discussing Dharma on an online forum? How could it be worthwhile, if "speaking about a thing misses the mark" and "even one word is too much"?
Both quotes you cite come from the Chan/Zen tradition. It is very typical for Chan to emphasize "transmission beyond scripture" and "silent illumination". Not all of Buddhism is like that though.

Gautama Buddha for example spoke about Dharma for 40 years. Tibetan Buddhists wrote hundreds of volumes about Madhyamaka, Tantra and Lam Rim (Stages of the Path). Even Chan/Zen masters themselves left a massive library of texts - koan collections, sutras, treatises, commentaries, lecture drafts etc.

Why talk about Dharma at all? As Buddha taught, the more we give our attention to something -- the more our mind gets tuned to that -- the more it becomes part of how we see the world -- the more it shapes our thoughts and actions. So the idea is, at least in theory, that the more we talk about Dharma, the more it penetrates our minds and actions.

At the same time, Buddha himself compared Dharma to a raft. It is useful as a vehicle for taking you to the other side - but once you are there you don't have to carry it with you. In fact, holding on to the raft could be an obstacle to one's Unbinding. In other words, obsession with Dharma could easily become Anti-Dharma. There are examples documented even in Pali Canon of people quarreling about particular Dharma point with Buddha having to step in and teach non-attachment to views. Second Anuruddha Sutta (A 3.128) shows how thinking about Dharma can go contrary to fulfilling Dharma in practice. The Theravada tradition warns about getting lost in quasi-dharmic intellectual proliferation, what they call "papanca".

This is exactly the same point Chan masters emphasize. The period when Prajnaparamita and Chan developed was the time when people obsessed over the raft. The Abhi-dharma movement chewed the original suttas to the bone - and came up with what they thought was a neat distillation of Dharma - the matrikas (bulletpoint lists) of Four Truths, Three Poisons, Four Efforts, Five Skandhas, Sixteen Levels of Knowledge and so on and so forth. Several centuries after Buddha's Parinirvana, people started grasping onto the specifics and missing the forest behind the trees. Some schools seriously argued how many dharmas the world is made of, 76 or 89.

As a reaction to this extreme, there emerged the Mahayana tradition - spearheaded by the Prajnaparamita movement - whose entire method is built on the contrast between the literal meaning of the teaching, with what it points to in the actual practice. At the same time, both at the peak of Chan's popularity and today, students keep on studying texts and Chan Masters keep on giving the Dharma lectures. Knowledge of Buddhist fundamentals, in their basic conceptual form, was and remains a prerequisite for receiving the more advanced instruction.

Tibetan Buddhists go as far as to say there are in fact two Dharmas - Dharma of Transmission and Dharma of Realization. Transmission consists of memorizing and passing on the texts of the three baskets: Vinaya, Sutra and Abhidharma - or more broadly the conceptual aspect of Buddhism. Realization is the actual training in Discipline, Meditation, and Wisdom - as they apply to one's daily life. The two relate as getting the map and walking the path. While mere owning the map does not get you anywhere, without the map the next generation would simply have no idea which way to go.

Another way to see this, while Buddhism teaches "liberation through wisdom" (liberation from what? wisdom about what?) not everyone can jump straight from Avici Hell to Nirvana-with-no-remainder, not everyone even wants to - so there is gotta be a way to motivate people who are not exactly on the right track. This is another reason Dharma of Transmission is necessary.

This is kinda how I myself see this site: while it can't replace a face-to-face apprenticeship with a live master, at least it can provide inspiration and positive motivation to people who have no idea what Buddhism is even about. If in addition to that it can clarify some confusion for more advanced students and point them in the right direction, I will feel verily gratified :)) One of my biggest pains growing up was overuse of upaya by teachers I learned from - mostly due to my own bad karma - so the vow I gave to myself is to share liberating realization and basic sanity openly to help new people avoid pain and confusion I went through.

Anyway, to come back to your quote, The instant you speak about a thing, you miss the mark. - I believe this refers not as much to the horrible dangers of speaking (after all you can totally "miss the mark" while staying perfectly silent!) - as to the fundamental confusion between reality and its models. Our mind keeps on building these models trying to understand reality based on our past experience - but as we project the model back onto reality we see the pant monsters we ourselves created - not the actual reality! Attachment, aversion, and reification of such mind-made phantoms - and the mental/verbal/physical action based on these three - is the fuel that feeds the fire of Samsara. Liberation from suffering caused by such phantoms, through understanding the nature of mind, is the main point of everything I am talking about here, and when it comes to this basic point,


  when you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized [this] understanding, even one word is too much.


It's not like understanding this point makes you instantaneously Enlightened - there is still a lifetime of practice, overcoming one's reification/attachment habits - but at least knowing this you can relax about the whole thing and not feel like a donkey chasing the carrot of Nirvana while secretly hating this world.

Of course if all we do is talk about Buddhism in the way of entertainment while holding on to our models in the daily life - we would be totally missing the mark.