On Jun 22, 2005, at 5:00 PM, Dave Land wrote:
Lovely thoughts to cool impassioned minds from "Hsin Hsin Ming,"
(Verses on the Faith Mind):
The tao is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When
love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and
undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven
and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth
then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what
you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.
When the deep meaning of things is not understood the mind's
essential peace is disturbed to no avail.
I'll try to remember this -- and avoid the disease of the mind --
when one or another of my brothers or sisters here decides to
tell us all How It Should Be.
That's one application of the meaning of the passage; a more
traditional interpretation is that we're meant to understand there is
no dualism.
I've carried on with Dan a little about the idea of relative evil, or
that social context provides the backdrop against which actions are
judged to be meritorious or wrongful. This dovetails with the above
passage in the sense that as soon as we pass any judgment we're missing
the big picture; we're immersing ourselves in context.
If there is no absolute evil -- if there is instead action which, in
one context, is appropriate but which, in another context, is not,
perhaps this becomes a little more clear. We believe individually that
killing is wrong (in the main, anyway), yet it happens all the time,
often on our behalf, which means in a system of representative
government that we've sanctioned it.
Interposing a division between "I" and "you" is another example of a
concept that, from another perspective, is not valid. An old Buddhist
insight-meditation trick is to try to find where your "self" is
located. There are some who get deeply offended by the exercise,
because they insist that what they discover is not valid: That there is
no one seat of the self in *any* of us, that when you get right down to
it we're no more "selves" than waves are. (This is why Buddhism has no
doctrine of a soul; there isn't one to be found, so the teaching is
that it doesn't exist. Also it can't in Buddhist thinking, because a
soul, being eternal, would have to arise independently, and there is no
such thing as independent origination in the Buddhist mindset. There is
only cause and effect in an endless chain.)
But then you can get bogged down in esoterica, and all the discovery in
the world doesn't change the fact that when you're hungry, you need to
feed your "self". ;)
The nondualistic interpretation is that there isn't an individual self;
there is only an aggregate (_skhanda_) that *acts like one* and for the
most part can be treated as a self. It just doesn't hurt to remember
that the apparent solidity of individuality is really nonexistent, an
illusion created by consciousness's peculiar properties in humans.
Taoism in China eventually colored Ch'an, which in Japan is better
known as Zen. There is a deep Taoist flavor to all Zen teachings, and
of all the traditions in the Buddhist lineage Zen seems to be the most
difficult to grok. Koans don't help; they're deliberately formulated to
be inscrutable. Even getting past the idea of dualism is extremely
difficult, and Zen makes it muddier by avoiding explication. That's
part of the Zen perspective: When you speak of something you are
discerning, and discernment takes one away from enlightenment or
realization of the essential nature of life.
There are schools that go into greater depth; Thich Nhat Hanh
(Vietnamese Buddhism), the Dalai Lama (one Tibetan school) and Sakyong
Mipham (another Tibetan lineage) have all elaborated quite well on the
basics. What it all comes down to is that we want to concretize things,
make them permanent, which we can't do; and this leads to suffering. By
imposing dualism we can forget that *everyone* is going through this
distress to some extent, in one form or another; some respond by
inventing a god, while others respond by insisting that no god is there
-- but underneath, there's this quest to make *something* real, solid
and permanent, even if it's the idea of non-godhead.
We suffer in similar ways because we're deluded in similar ways, and in
attempting to resolve our distress we generally end up only making
things worse. And often we forget that others are experiencing similar
distress to our own, so we add, deliberately or not, to their burdens
as well.
(A prime example of this kind of delusional cycle is car advertising,
which suggests that the only way to be really happy, satisfied and at
ease is to have a new shiny toy every year or two; never mind the debt,
never mind the waste. Many many people fall into this trap, too, even
though it's so clearly a trap. This is an example of _samsara_, or
confusion/delusion brought about by attachment to impermanence.)
So distinctions are "bad" in Taoism as well as Zen, and are considered
misconceptions in many other Buddhist traditions.
That isn't to say there's no use for discernment; just that our way of
understanding actions should take the idea of attachment to
impermanence into account, and that we can look at anything we do from
the perspective of whether it will increase or relieve suffering.
That seems like a very simple thing to do, but when you look deeply
into actions and how they affect others -- and how our actions are
themselves responses to events which have been precipitated by others
-- this superficially easy question becomes quite profound. Even
something as simple as a potato contains, ultimately, everything, from
the soil in which it was grown to sunlight, the bodies of insects,
animals and people, stardust, the labors of others as well as
ourselves, and of course the Big Bang. When we're eating that potato,
we're taking nourishment from the entire cosmos.
Nevertheless, we also sleep when we're tired and eat when we're hungry.
We're just not supposed to think such actions carry any cosmic
significance ... because they *do*. And because they do *not*.
--
Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books
http://books.nightwares.com/
Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror"
http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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