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 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
