tariki

It's that "law of the excluded middle".......it never fails to get me confused.

Too many "answers"

Thanks. (Apparently, according to Facebook, the highlight of the festive season was the sight of grandad galloping across the carpet on his grandaughters new hobby horse.)

Reading further on Mr Batchelor ( as a contrast with our dear Queen's Christmas message ), he delves into Nagarguna's text (quoted previously) He contrasted the Buddha's teaching with the "neti neti" ( not this!, not this! ) of the Upanishads. The Buddha not only states that our experienced self is not to be identified with "mind and matter", it is also not to be considered as different ( other than them ) Ken Wilber speaks of Nagarguna and "emptiness", also using the phrase "the unqualifiability of ultimate reality" which, Wilber then says, could be said "neither to be, nor not to be, nor both, nor neither - the idea being to clear the mind of any and all concepts of reality so that reality itself can be directly experienced" I think Stephen B, in his more existential fashion, would object to any idea of "directly experiencing reality" and speak rather of just living unencumbered by the dictates of craving and egotism, of reactivity, so as to "cultivate a way of life in which human beings can flourish" and becoming a free self-creating person. To "respond" rather than to "react".

A quote from Nagarjuna is the heading of the next chapter of Stephen Batchelor's book. Were mind and matter me I would come and go like them If I were something else They would say nothing about me Please don't get indigestion over the festive season.

I actually had 24 more hours of freedom than I thought. I really must listen to She who must be obeyed more closely. But now we have the expensive china moved to places of safety, and my prized Seagull guitar replaced by a plywood version bought cheaply at the local Charity Shop - the little ones can now use THAT for their attacks upon Grandad. Speaking of faith and paths, thinking back, I can sort things out a bit. I was a 20th century European, Christianity and everything else was THE ground I walked on, the "way the universe was", a window from which I looked out at other, exotic, ways of being that were not quite true in the same sense. Then, reading "The Vision of Dhamma" by Nyanaponika Thera, the ground shifted. The "exotic" became as real a possibility as anything I was then walking upon, another "ground", another "window". Once the ground shifts like that there can be no going back even if one wanted to. One ground becomes as possible as another. It has nothing at all to do with truth being relative, subjective or objective. So for me, looking back, no, it was not a faith decision for Buddhism, rather a recognition that trust/faith must needs be in Reality as such, and never in my own capacity to "work things out",or to decide by intellect the "true" version by which I "must" live. It is a letting go of such. Yes, I identify as a Pure Land Buddhist, but in the context I have sought to explain above. There is no path that is mine. In fact I can wander at will, get lost, have absolutely no allegiance to anything at all, Reality-as-is takes the "burden". All is grace. The "Gospel According to Zen" has been mentioned. Merton speaks in a letter to Suzuki of the similarities of grace within a non-theistic, non-dual tradition, with that of Christianity....... ......we are in paradise, and what fools would we be to think thoughts that would put us out of it (as if we could be out of it!). One thing I would add. To my mind, the Christian doctrine of grace (however understood - I mean here the gift of God's life to us) seems to me to fulfill a most important function in all this. The realization, the finding of ourselves in Christ and hence in paradise, has a special character from the fact that this is all a free gift from God. With us, this stress on freedom, God's freedom, the indeterminateness of salvation, is the thing that corresponds to Zen in Christianity. The breakthrough that comes with the realization of what the finger of a koan is pointing to is like the breakthrough of the realization that a sacrament, for instance, is a finger pointing to the completely spontaneous Gift of Himself to us on the part of God - beyond and above images, outside of every idea, every law, every right or wrong, everything high or low, everything spiritual or material. Whether we are good or bad, wise or foolish, there is always this sudden irruption, this breakthrough of God's freedom into our life, turning the whole thing upside down so that it comes out, contrary to all expectation, right side up. This is grace, this is salvation, this is Christianity. And, so far as I can see, it is also very much like Zen......... For me, living by Grace is being free from any ultimate dependence on my own discriminations, and as the realisation grows that I can do absolutely nothing to help myself, or work anything out by my own calculations or even allegiances, rather than feeling more and more helpless.....well, yes, I must testify to some sort of sense of release, though intermittent at times. And just to add - and I have mentioned this before somewhere - but what I love within the Pure Land way is how there is such a wide spectrum of "grace" within it. There are those who see "Amida" as "him up there, out to the West", who indeed bestows His Compassion upon them, and they anticipate being taken to the Pure Land at death, there to enjoy the fruit of their devotions. At the other end of the spectrum, Amida merely represents/personifies Reality-as-is, which is "emptiness" itself (so empty it is free to contain everything), and the Pure Land is NOW, this moment, when we are released from our own grasping and desires and calculations. And we are all friends together. They are only words. And the Dharma is for "crossing over, not for grasping".

Ah ha! Just spotted that you are thormas, not thomas. I've been speaking to the wrong person all this time. No matter. As I am now slipping into party mood your bookshelf book made be think of some comments that Merton made in his Preface to his book "The Way of Chuang Tzu", that he was ( in that book ) in no way seeking to pull Christian rabbits out of a Taoist hat. He loved Chuang Tzu simply for who he was. So the "gospel" of zen?

Thomas, I took "master words" from some quote that Rom offered in this thread. I just took what I needed and left the rest. No matter. "Emptiness" , well, I have offered a few words here and there. Plus a book recomendation. Take what you need and leave the rest. I would put a smiley here if my kindle was up to it. Happy Christmas.

Anyway, I think a few loved ones are invading tomorrow ( I suspect they are only coming for the turkey ) so the Christmas Holiday beckons. I might not have a lot of time for posting, especially with grandchildren taking turns on my knee for the horsey races.

Curiouser and curiouser.....who said that? For better or worse I tend to take the advice found in the lyrics of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", i.e. "Just take what you need and leave the rest". Which certainly has its dangers, but in my defence I would say that is what virtually everyone does in their own way. Buddhism obviously has no Christology as such. But in Christianity there are high and low Christologies. Some start with the pure humanity of Christ and work there way up, others begin with the Highest God and work there way down. If a Christian, I would start very low indeed, and stay there. Anyway, Buddhism, like Christianity, has "many mansions". I am a Pure Land Buddhist. I would leave "Absolute changeless permanant reality" to a high Buddhology, if there is such a thing.

Joseph, who offered that as a summary of the Pali Canon? ( By the way, just reading again from Stephen Batchelor's latest, and his deconstruction, then reconstruction, of the "There must be an Unborn, an Unconditioned" passage, drawn from the Udana, makes for good reading, if nothing else. Mr Batchelor would, I think, see the "summary" offered as more a neo-hinduism in need of its own deconstruction)

Thomas, without quoting all you have said again in your last response to me, it appears that you agree with everything I have said myself yet then imply that a "realised eschatology" in the here and now is inadequate and "must have" more. Then you offer your own "master words", words which for me add nothing. We must leave it at that.

Somewhere I lost your thread. Where did the "hope" come from? What I said was that to have an eye on the future is to be missing something. Which becomes in your musings that Suzuki is missing something by living in the present. What "must" Suzuki see? That there is somewhere, sometime, a better place or state of being? Another Buddhist once said that "the only extension to the present is intensity". If our "present" involves knowing it only as the preliminary to a better world then as I see it we are back to betrayal. Again I would ask the question........how exactly does the "better" come to be? By seeing our "lack" and the "lack" in others, or, "acceptance" and the paradox that it is pure acceptance itself that is the catalyst for transformation. Emptiness? Empty of what? Empty of an intrinsic self. Empty of a particular state of "being", thus able to be all things ( or "the ten thousand things" in Buddhist speak ) When we look at Jesus, if that is indeed our thing, do we see an individual "self" who gives himself to us by extension to be known at some future date, or He that has emptied Himself in eternal participation? Do we, in Christian speak, accept the cross ONLY to know the resurrection? In which case, has it really been accepted? Thus another betrayal of our suffering world. Sorry, just musing and thinking out loud. "Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.. ..but in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful" ( Auden, lines from "Lullaby" )

SPOILER ALERT! ( ) The essay ends with a vague disagreement between Merton and Suzuki....(perhaps if Suzuki had been a few years younger Merton might well have resorted to fisticuffs) It concerns the eschatalogical dimension of Christianity, perculiar to itself, which "has no parallel in Buddhism", where the one "Son of God" will transfigure the cosmos and offer it resplendent to the Father (Merton's words). Suzuki is content with a realised eschatology in the here and now, and asserts that "Father Louis" has fallen from true emptiness, which has not gone far enough. Merton acknowledges that yes, he has drifted back into image and concept. I think here we see the profound relevance of the character I spoke of earlier, in a Terry Pratchett novel, the guy who either knew where he was going or where he was, but never both at the same time. Such a state of being (or non-being) would seem to be in harmony with much of the new physics, which abounds in paradox, of which one said that if you claim to understand it you show that you don't. I would just say that if we do live in the "empathic moment" (a realised eschatology) there is nothing to stop us getting anywhere eventually, while one who has their eye on the future is missing something somewhere. But maybe that is only my own perception.........I have no idea just where I am going.

Ah ha! What price Wisdom ( empty or not ) ? Just googling, and that seems to be the price of some signatured copy. The whole book, "Zen and the Birds of Appetite" is available at £7.99 ( UK ) and equivalent price elsewhere.

Well, a vague sense of disatisfaction with my supposed "answers" here and there. The central, maybe unique, contribution of Buddhism to the great debate ( what is Reality? ) is "Not-self". One Theravada based Dictionary states that failure to understand this "doctrine" leads to failure to understand all else of the Dharma, even to misunderstand and misrepresent. "Not-self". Anatta. Not that there is a self to get rid of, or to work upon. There is no self. End of story. But here we are. Thus T S Eliot and returning to where we started and knowing it for the first time. Nothing has changed yet all has changed. And what was the point of it all? ( Maybe the genesis of a theodicy there if we are that way inclined ) "For the garden is the only place there is yet we shall not find it until we have searched everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert" (Auden) We can enter the "thicket of views" and get lost in the small print. Or there is simple trust, a letting go. "And a little child shall lead them" (Just to add, as I understand it, the distinction between Theravada and Mahayana is that "Not-self" is extended to all of Reality. Thus "emptiness ". All is empty. Yet here it is)

Simply put, Buddhist non-dualism:- There is conventional truth There is ultimate truth Conventional truth and ultimate truth are One. Or, samsara = nirvana That is it. For me, to enter the world of conventional truth in order to understand or attain ultimate truth is, in the words of the Buddhist texts, to enter a world of speculative views, the thicket of views, the wilderness of views, the contortion of views, the vacillation of views, the fetter of views. Fettered by the fetter of views, we do not end suffering. Now it may be that striving to "understand", entering such a "thicket of views", is just not my cup of tea, I may just not like the sheer effort of seeking to understand, but for now I rest in what is for me the only "view" that does not betray THIS world for some imagined "other", an "other" that may exist beyond death or some time in the future. Yes, I recoil from the effort to try to understand using dualistic logic, a logic that sends me into ever decreasing circles, into the world of dukkha, one that for millennia has resolved nothing. A Pure Land Master, Honen, said:- when a scholar is born they forget the nembutsu. Gratitude tells me that all is given, not attained. Just so. As far as "emptiness", forget it if it does not tick your box. Perhaps read the essay "Wisdom in Emptiness", a dialogue between Merton and Suzuki contained in the book "Zen and the Birds of Appetite".

"You" and "I", once coming into being, are "related"? Exactly what is related? Dependant origination is the "ground", the "firm ground of emptiness" as one buddhist comic once said.

Buddhism is a bit weak when it comes to beginnings and often it seems difficult to discern ends. Unlike Christianity with its "In the beginning........" and then its various eschatologies, the "last things" AKA the "end times". "No discernable beginning" seems an ongoing mantra of various texts. Dependant origination, as I understand it ( and there seems subtle variations between Theravada and Mahayana ) is not at all about initial causes or beginnings, nor about any sequence of cause and effect. I would see it more as yet another take on "emptiness", that there are no self existent/self explanatory entities that remain through time. "Let go what is before Let go what is behind Let go the middle And get beyond becoming" ( Udana ) So even the duality of "being" as opposed to "becoming" would seem to be excluded........nowhere for the mind to cling.

Hello again Thomas Does invoking the word "other" and "seeing" them as living lives without love, does this lead to the resolution of a world of "vulnerability that entails risk"? What is it that causes us to act? Words, words, and yet more words! Are you the only one who can speak of "paradox"? I spoke of Buddhist non-dualism........not that "all is one" but rather that all is NOT two. It was not a Buddhist who spoke of the dewdrop slipping into the shining sea. It is more that the shining sea slips into the dewdrop, but as Nagarjuna wrote, if the word "fire" was the thing itself then our mouth would burn when we said it. In my own Pure Land path, in its symbolism, gold represents tthe undifferentiated nature of enlightenment, while the lotus flower signifies the uniqueness of each individual self. In depictions of the Pure Land there are infinite golden lotus flowers blowing in the wind. How can reality get lost? Words, words and more words. "The raft of the dharma is for passing over, not for grasping". You would seem to imply/fear that we can leap from the raft in mid ocean, well before reaching the Other Shore, thus leaving our world of suffering behind. Yes, so we can. Then we could say that "the journey is home"........where then is the raft, the ocean, the Other Shore? Thomas Merton, a good Catholic, invoked paradox. In his speech on true communion he said that we were already one, but did not know it, that we must become what we are. In another place he spoke of already possessing God, yet how far I have to go to find You in Whom I have alrady arrived. From the Pali texts:- In protecting oneself one protects others In protecting others one protects oneself I "recoil" to protect myself. We are all speaking from our own perspective. As Rom quoted somewhere, and implied the question, are there a set of "master words" that suit Reality better than others in some definitive way? Do we all need to learn the words? Are they found in a particular book?

I instantly recoil from the idea that at core I am a "being" to be "actualised". All such teleological approaches seem to threaten what I would call the empathy of each moment - a moment that knows nothing but itself. Eckhart said "Love has no why" To say that the "why" of a human in some sense sets us apart creates the very duality that is the source and heart of suffering ( dukkha )

Just happened to hit this small section of Stephen Batchelors latest book......"Sometime.....after ( the Buddha's death ) Buddhism seems to have taken a metaphysical turn. By adopting a language of truth, Buddhists moved from an engaged agency with the world to the theorizing stance of a detached subject contemplating epistemic objects........they shifted.....from prescripton to description, from pragmatism to ontology, from skepticism to dogmatism." Batchelor then asks why this happened. Maybe because our instinct is to "grasp" rather than "pass over".

Perhaps "stirred" if not "shaken"......... As I understand it, Buddhist non-duality is not that "all is one", rather that "all is not two". Which are just words again, but needs must. For me, all is a by-product of seeing/wisdom. Wisdom defined as "the mind/heart thirsting for emanciation seeing direct into the heart of reality" (Conze) Once we "see" then there are no "master words" that suit more than others. The Dharma is for "crossing over, not for grasping". A catholic scholar, Heinrich Dumoulin, has written..... Whether, on its deepest ground, being is personal or impersonal, is something that humans will never be able to plumb by their rational powers. Here we face a decision which one makes according to one's own tradition and upbringing, and still more according to one's faith and experience. The Christian sees ultimate reality revealed in the personal love of God as shown on Christ, the Buddhist in the silence of the Buddha. Yet they agree on two things: that the ultimate mystery is ineffable, and that it should be manifest to human beings. The inscription on a Chinese stone figure of the Buddha, dated 746, reads...... "The Higest truth is without image. If there were no image at all, however, there would be no way for truth to be manifested. The highest principle is without words. But if there were not words at all, how could principle possibly be revealed?" Well, my grandaughter, not yet three, is not to be fooled. After a year or so of "grandad's special pizza" she saw through the whole thing.........."THATS not pizza, thats cheese on toast". And Grandad, chastened, retired to the kitchen to lick his wounds.

I'm content that Stephen Batchelor makes sense of Buddhism for me. Those texts considered fundamental, and often claimed to represent the historical word of the Buddha, state that the "heartwood of the Dharma" is an "unshakeable deliverance of mind". ( Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation ) As I see it, a mind committed to any metaphysical belief system CANNOT be free, and sets itself up to be "shaken" by reality. "Agnosticism" for me, as for Stephen Batchelor ( and he has helped me see this ) leads to a metaphysics of empathy - rather that a metaphysics of hope and fear. We can LIVE truly. As I see it, any "master" words can only "be true" in the empathic moment. Afterwards they enter the treacherous sea of language. Someone once said that the truth dies with each zen master, "the rest they put into their books".

Cigars and flavours....... Merton speaks of built in ejector seats that fling us "out of our conceptual understanding into the void" and says that perhaps Buddhism is more able/likely to do this than Christianity (ref his essay "A Christian looks at Zen") Anyway, it always comes back to paradox, but straight forwardly, without "emptiness" or any other "thingy", after all our exploration we shall return to the place where we started and know it for the first time (T S Eliot) Acceptace/trust, some say "faith".