"A man should not inwardly harm his person with 'good' and 'bad,' but rather should accord with the spontaneous [ziran] and not add to life."
To play chess with yourself,
for example, you have to split into two people and pretend you don't know the other person's next move any more than you would if you were actually playing with another person. This internal splitting requires that you use the ability to forget yourself immediately after you have made a move. Can that succeed?
How can you forget yourself?
Perhaps, if one makes a truly remarkable distinction when changing the person whose turn it is, like an actor who slips into a role he is eager to try out. So he has to tune in to this new person, take in his seat and game figures and pretend for a short time that he knows nothing of what the opponent was thinking only a few seconds ago. He plays blitz chess and is guided by nothing but spontaneity.
A kind of mad fun.
Forgetting oneself in a situation that demands just that, where does this idea take me? Forgetting everything you know and think you know, why should that even matter?
Doesn't human coexistence demand exactly the opposite?
To know one's way, to have a goal, to use one's knowledge, to access information? Indeed, that is so. But does anything speak against doing all this by means of skilful spontaneity?
You wouldn't be playing chess against yourself if you didn't manage to block out the predictability of your opponent's move, would you? That would be boring. Like telling yourself a joke you already know.
To me, it seems that people do just that: they prefer to tell jokes they already know. Me included.
Let me explain this through the use of a Zen anecdote.
Cook Ding was carving an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As his hand slapped, shoulder lunged, foot stamped, knee crooked, with a hiss! with a thud! the brandished blade as it sliced never missed the rhythm, now in time with the Mulberry Forest dance, now with an orchestra playing the Zhing-shou.
“Oh excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “That skill should attain such heights!” “What your servant cares about is the Way; I have left skill behind me. When I first began to carve oxen, I saw nothing but oxen wherever I looked. Three years more, and I never saw an ox as a whole. Nowadays, I am in touch through the daemonic in me, and do not look with the eye. With the senses I know where to stop, the daemonic I desire to run its course.
I rely on Heaven’s structuring, cleave along the main seams, let myself be guided by the main cavities, go by what is inherently so. A ligament or tendon I never touch, not to mention solid bone. A good cook changes his chopper once a year, because he hacks. A common cook changes it once a month, because he smashes. Now I have had this chopper for nineteen years, and have take apart several thousand oxen, but the edge is as though it were fresh from the grindstone. . . .
“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Listening to the words of Cook Ding, I have learned from them how to nurture life.”
The author of the text from which I took this anecdote, wrote further:
It is easy to see how this picture of skillful spontaneity constitutes a spiritual as well as moral ideal: total awareness brings spiritual equanimity by means of perfect attunement between a person and her surroundings. If there is anything transcendent about Cook Ding’s ability, it lies solely in the degree to which he has attained the ideal of total awareness.
However, this picture assumes that the context of human activity is unambiguous—as if the relevant situation or “issue” is always given—and that the scope of human awareness is potentially unlimited.
- Is it possible to be aware of everything relevant to a given issue?
- Is the issue with which one should be most concerned readily determinable?
- Does awareness of everything relevant to an issue always lead unequivocally to one optimum solution, X?
Spiritual equanimity results from a state of total and penetrating attention only if the answer to all three questions is yes. But it seems that the complexity of human life is such that many issues are constantly competing for our attention, and that each issue presents conflicts of irreconcilable values. Even if total awareness were possible, it would not guarantee perfect harmony.
what could a spiritual way of acting possibly be, if moral perfection is impossible? I contend that scholars of the Zhuangzi have yet to provide a clear and convincing answer to this question.
No, they don't take on the role to be the eternal answer givers. That is exactly the point.
The author misunderstood it. Not they owe him an answer. It is he himself, the author, who is the only one to give it. If you have come this far, like the author in digging into the deeper realms of teachings, the message can be easily found that there is no one providing anything. The teachers and masters of skillful spontaneity knew and know that the ultimate answer (insight) lies in the human who demands a "clear and convincing answer". But he will not be convinced by any other answer but his "clearing" own.
As a reader, one is inclined to take the story all too literally instead of seeing it as a stylistic device,
the device of exaggeration.
Exaggeration is excellent for conveying something. Rightly, the author asks exactly the questions he does and one would like to congratulate him! And then he immediately lapses into himself and demands answers. Where he was already so close! But since I have not read the whole treatise, I hope he will say something about it in another place.
Zen people basically argue like modern genuine scientists
who do not claim to have found the absolute answer, but merely one that is good enough for the moment. Just as the masters of Zen would not say to follow them, neither do the scientists who contradict those who say "follow the science".
Zen takes it to extremes and exaggerates beyond measure by saying, "I have nothing to say, nothing to teach, I am not even a teacher or a master, yet if you want to follow me, that's your choice."
Moral perfection is indeed impossible,
and by accepting that it is, I let go of any desired perfection. I shall completely forget about the idea of moral perfectionism while I stay open for the chance it can be done in the exact moment of forgetfulness. I don't know for sure but I let chance take place. I go with the flow of chances. Not with the blockades of certainty.
I can have a moment of utter clarity and carry the insight that I am not perfect, like a tiny pearl in my pocket, while walking casually through life.
But if I turn this insight into heavy rocks, burden myself "inwardly and harm me with 'good' and 'bad'", I may arrive at the moment where I cannot carry them anymore. I will then want to get rid of those damn rocks and hand them over to my fellow human beings, tired, unnerved and frustrated by their heaviness and tell them: "Here, you take this shit load, I give up!"
The reason why I like to swim against the perceived stream is, when a term becomes overloaded.
When I hear everywhere I go that "one shall be aware", I am saying the opposite, that "one shall forget."
But if I hear that "forgetting is the most important issue", I say: "One shall be aware."
I don't do this to aggravate but to show the funny side of it. But then, I do want to aggravate (in a silly way).
The moment I lose skillful spontaneity, and I will, because the person I am conversing with finds me in doubt of his or her own maturity in terms of skillful spontaneity in all moments in time, this might motivate me to argue that it was not my intention to aggravate and from there it goes like an escaping horse, back and forth, forth and back.
As long as I can take it casually, it shall not be a problem.
But the moment I regret having said anything and feel treated unfairly, it's better to leave it and move on.
Though I could say that I intended to aggravate the person I converse with in a silly way at the very beginning of our dialogue. In fact, I tried that out.
Mysteriously enough, that man overheard this announcement and took all my pretended insults for real. HaHa!
If I cannot let go of the game "I am smarter than you",
I lose all skillful spontaneity and become all entangled in harming myself in "god" and "bad".
I listened to Alan Watts over and over and over again. The repetition helps me to take in what I have understood as a paradox. When I want to become spiritually matured I shall let go of the desire to become spiritually matured.
Indeed, the role of a temporary master can be found in ordinary people who show good argumentative skills.
No matter how I squirm, the other person always seems to have the better arguments. How do I deal with this challenge? It is easy to call him names or ridicule his character. However, by not shying away from this competition, but rather trying my hand at it, I can learn that I can refine and develop arguments.
I don't want to beat him and his arguments to death, I allow the unique experience that through the other person's persistent logical explanation I have been helped to grow beyond my usual. The more one aggravates me the more challenged I can become in a casual way.
Until it's time to cook lunch.
Bye bye :)
Picture source:
Von In commission of the Prince Sultan Ibrahim Mirza - Haft Awrang, Seven Thrones, of Jami (link), Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=166104
Citations:
That author is a clod - adding "total" and "perfect" and "guarantee", as if they mean something. Is a "total idiot" more so than a mere "idiot"?
maybe he should have read the Tractatus - then maybe Zen logic would make more sense - or at least be more meaningful.
;-)
Someone who crosses the road does not need to know the history of the car to know which way to look.
HaHa :D good question, I'll keep it in mind.
ist it anywhere available online?
I think the author assumes something like the super human, with super phenomenal abilities. If that is my view of "flow" or skilful spontaneity, I can only conclude that it is impossible to exercise spiritual equanimity.
He does not mention - as far as I have read - the relationships between people, which are essential for the way we live together and where it is only apparent to the individual whether someone is practising spiritual equanimity. Theory and practice are mutually dependent.
As I understand Zen and other Buddhist content, it is a dialogical experiential method.
I need someone who is already more advanced in theory and practice to have the living experience of life being paradoxical in a dialogue with that person. I need the element of surprise, something absurd and disturbing.
It is, however, a very valuable read because it takes up exactly the arguments that I'm sure a great many people have when they try to understand Zen and Buddhist content.
Many copies of the Tractatus.
here is an amusing nested version: https://www.tractatuslogico-philosophicus.com/
This gives a brief overview of Buddhist logic = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology
The whole business of perceptions, inferences and correct knowledge has a long history.
"a dialogical experiential method" - in practice, yes. And this is where we come to those questions that have no answers, either because they are not really questions (eg much of theology) or because the answers are experiential.
I found the Tractatus strangely helpful in the esoteric sciences as a method of mental hygiene to clear out pointless questions.
Buddhism makes no references to any "gods", but rather seeks to establish why such questions would create dis-ease. the question isn't, "is there a God?" but rather, "why care?"
Thank you very much for the Tractatus link. I happily receive it.
That applies just fine when I feel I have difficulties understanding the theory. So practice helps out.
When I first learned that Buddhism does not work from the story of creation, all my unease went away in one fell swoop. I thought, "Oh!", which resulted in the very thing you say: it's not relevant. If it's not relevant, then I don't need to struggle with it any further. As an educated Christian, I can take that as a revelation, especially because Christians ask for a beginning and a creator. The surprise it caused me laughed in my face.
I wonder, if this also happens vice versa, where asian raised people get the same surprises when they study Christian theology. I am though most certain that it does.
Having lived in SE Asia, I have to say that most people here have no idea about their alleged Buddhism - it looks like much of the Khmer Hinduism is still here, plus animism. It is an interesting study in syncretism. lol. And within that is this abiding desire (flaw) to believe stuff.
One example is that they recite the Pali canon - in Pali, which nobody understands! So, what are they learning? Is like going to a mass in Latin knowing no Latin.
Again from one of my teachers, I recall him having a dig at some of the people, paraphrasing:"This is not faith; believing is a low level experience. If you have swapped one belief (Christianity) for another, then is best you go back to your own religion!"
Hinduism is not a unitary system, so has some creation myths while some schools don't. You get the sense of Brahma as similar to the Godhead, so an eternal abstraction. At which point, one can get trapped in such illusions of thought, and that is the one thing Buddhism seeks to avoid.
This is amusing...
;-)
That is funny, and interesting. I had experiences when very young that showed me a different universe, hence had zero faith in either priests or Christianity. However, it took some years to articulate the concept, so when I came across some of the earliest writings, in both Hinduism and Buddhism, was more a sense of recognition than something new.
The starting point was to explain the experiences, not to create yet another cosmogeny.
Just the other days I had a dialogue about what can be called a surprise and why it is helpful. The way I see it, is that the sense of recognition, in the moment it sets in, gives me the element of delightful surprise, for I obviously have forgotten about what I once cognized.
"Recognition" for me does not contradict "surprise", I perceive it as one and the same thing the moment I realize that some thing I have forgotten re-emerges into my sight. The logic it provides me with is that I go through life and pick up realizations and then, during every day routine, I forget them. Forgetting can be either judged as "damn you!" or "naive you!" but it does not eliminate the very fact that it happens nevertheless.
Speaking of early experiences, I can recall that whenever my mom told me about god I sensed something incoherent about her concept of sin. I was, of course, not able to articulate it to her. So I either lied to her or ignored her efforts to teach me. It's a pity in one way, for it caused some blockades for a long time to dive deeper into Christianity and findig its treasures. Both, Occident and Orient, can provide me with re-cognitions, if I let them.
I would subscribe to that.
Thank you for those lines. Highly appreciated.
To the rest:
I would think that the same applies to Christianity. The knowledge of what theological writings or their authors had to say is more than superficial.
On the other hand, staying with practical congregational experience, I would not necessarily assume that the language in which prayer or song is recited necessarily needs to be understood by the word. It is not very relevant in moments of congregational singing in a church or chapel to be carried through an event, I am speaking here of funeral ceremonies or the important holidays, for example. We adults are quick to forget the children, who only exert their intellect long after they have already had the mystical experience of what it feels like to hear a congregation chanting.
Chantings, monastic choirs, folklore (lullabies, for example, that stir something deep within you), are of an artistic musical nature, they allow intuitive access and I would even say they are suitable for wanting to engage with an understanding of the world in a theoretical spiritual way. If the singing was there first (without the words being understood), there is the possibility of also becoming interested in the scholastic background. If only scholasticism dominates, it is bad for practice.
The Buddhists who have the Buddha Dharma Sangha have understood, in my view, that not everyone can have an academic, intellectual and scholastic background, and that the "common people" can be quite content with what the monasteries or spiritual centres offer them in terms of a spiritual experience through chanting or reciting, without seeing themselves as knowing in a docile but just in an unscholarly existence.
However, I would immediately agree if it is not the un-worded spirit that flows through one when reciting or chanting Latin or Pali, but the whole affair becomes a dull and automatic one without experiencing the depth in it.
When I was a kid, I came in touch with it and the singing spoke a lot more to me than any command my mother gave me. So I admired her when she was singing, and I detested her when she was preaching.
Just on one point, this is where what one may perceive as "chanting" is not prayers at all - much of the time they are recitations of the visualisations they are doing as part of a meditation. Hence, not understanding the words is a huge handicap!
I have seen English translations tried, but somehow they need more work to make the tones, rhythms and words align. No doubt similar experiences took place in going from Sanskrit to Pali to Tibetan etc - even more so into Chinese and Japanese. There is also a visual aspect to this whereby traditional representations of "deities" (archetypes) do not elicit the same emotional states for Westerners. All of this takes time and an assimilation so that something like Buddhism is no longer seen as purely Asian.
BTW this iconographic syncretism already took place many centuries ago in Gandhara.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandharan_Buddhism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism
Sadly, the texts tended to travel eastwards rather than to the west - then again, the entrenched western monotheisms would prove hard to destroy. This is what happens when rampant fideism prevails = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan.
I agree with this to the extent that if no one from the community of those gathered knows the meaning of what is recited or the words and mantras chanted, the rest of the people gathered cannot be grasped by the spirit behind it. It always takes a few to sustain that spirit. Where those who are unlearned in the theological or scholastic contemplations, though, want to be learners and get the meaning, the whole congregational affair can continue at a high level. Where there is no scholar and practitioner of the doctrine within that group, whatever depth of meaning there is is lost. This is clearly noticeable when one goes to services where such things have been lost. In contrast to the congregations, where it is not. All it takes is ten people out of a hundred who are able to hit the tune, to bring the rest of those gathered together into an authentic mood. Instead of developing into an automatic and meaningless repetition of terms.
Agree. Also, assimilation of what is seen as purely Christian could take place.
The tractatus website, says the browser, is not safe. Is it Wittgenstein?
all browsers seem to now enjoy scaring people - not all sites are https, many old sites never bothered buying a certificate, that's all.
Good, I needed some technical explanation in that. Because I have no clue whatsoever if a site is https and bought a certificate or not. If you are saying that the link has no certificate but can otherwise be visited, I rely on your word.
No, they need to know what country they are in because 55% of the world drive on the wrong side...
HaHa! That produces a ghastly imagination. :D
lol - germany is one of them
all of these red countries are WRONG...
NZ has cheap cars because we get all the five year old cars from Japan
And India has so many cars that is why the blues still have 45%
Why didn't they swap the pedals too? so accelerate with the left foot.
Driving right hand drive, steering with the right hand, keeping left, all just seems so natural I can't even imagine left hand drive. There are a few classic American cars around here but they are hard to drive because it's almost impossible to overtake safely from the passenger side.
I've never seen left hand drive in the flesh, having only been to England and Australia outside of NZ.
Saw this car round the corner a few weeks ago - that would be worth huge $ despite being backwards!
I've driven in left-drive countries and even after "getting used to it", it still made no sense. I start with the assumption that most people are right-handed (the why is not important), so you want the dominant hand to do the precision stuff, ie steering, and the minor had does the clunky stuff, ie changing gears, or having a drink! In left-hand-drive cars the dominant hand is doing the minor stuff.
Sure, we can be trained -we are good monkeys - like training the foot to brake gently. lol.
Exactly - skill saws are the same - most of them built for left handed use - I got one with the blade on the left side and it is much easier to use, but they are pretty rare.
Shame on Germany.
Considered one of the single worst cars ever created, the Hoffmann was a post-WWII attempt at a cheap micro-car...
Hodge Hawk three-wheeler car from New Zealand
I like how it looks. Much more beetle-like than those which followed - The NZ Hodge Hawk model is the modern successor?
I am not very interested in cars, though - D
The Hawk was built as a prototype in 2007 but never manufactured - looked cool though.
German = cars!
My sister in law has a Mercedes and it's awesome - sitting in a heated armchair but riding in an almost silent, silky smooth tank!
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