Written by Ted Biringer on Saturday, January 28, 2012
Deconstructive and Reconstructive aspects of Emptiness
Characteristic of Dogen’s unrelenting commitment to “right-views” or the “true-eye” is his frequent, unequivocal insistence that “authenticity” of practice-enlightenment is the only criteria for gauging the Buddha-Dharma.
Dogen’s own adherence to this maxim is clearly demonstrated by his refusal to avoid complex challenges, sidestep unpleasant aspects, or water-down unpopular implications of Buddhist truths. If the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness is authentic, as Dogen contends, it must be applied universally (i.e. to all dharmas), which means, for one thing, that it must be applied to the doctrine of emptiness itself. And, while an intellectual understanding of emptiness is “not enough” – even this necessary first step cannot be considered complete prior to the “experiential verification of emptiness” which is itself only the beginning of the authentic wisdom of emptiness according to Dogen’s standards.
It would be no stretch to suggest that Dogen would view total ignorance of emptiness as preferable to wrong or partial (biased) notions of emptiness. As the works of Hee-Jin Kim demonstrate, for Dogen the liberating potential of emptiness is only actualized with the transcendence of the “deconstructive” experience of emptiness and advance into the “reconstructive” experience of emptiness – and even this actualizes only the potential of liberation. Thus it is that the reconstructive aspect of emptiness – which itself is continuously “cast-off” and “totally exerted” – as the only aspect of emptiness with practical liberating potential, is what Dogen directed his energy to transmitting.
The terms “deconstructive” and “reconstructive” (aspects of emptiness) designate two foci (focal points) of a single experiential process. This process can be envisioned as beginning from the common (unawakened) perspective wherein the self and the other are misperceived as separate entities, from here it proceeds to the initial experience of emptiness (i.e. the deconstructive mode) -often referred to in Zen as the “great death” - wherein self and other “drop away,” then, advancing through the “great death,” proceeding to the enlightened (awakened) perspective wherein self and other are experienced as they are (thusness): nondual (not two).
Here, then, one experientially realizes the truth that self and other are not different realities, but rather distinct foci of one (nondual) reality (i.e. nonduality/duality). From the enlightened (reconstructive) perspective one perceives the same reality that is perceived from the common perspective - but now in context of the insight actualized through the (deconstructive) experience of emptiness.
. People care about "the truth" and I guess I do too or I wouldn't be typing.
What are the attributes of truth, what are its characteristics?
Did anyone ever succeed in living a life that was somehow "not true?"
Whatever the truth is and however it is defined, it seems to me that the minute anyone tries to hold onto it, then it is like a child who reaches into the ocean, grabs a handful, and rushes home with a clenched fist to show his mom what a wondrous discovery he's made: By the time he bursts through the kitchen door, fist clenched and fully prepared to show off his prize ....
Maybe that's why moms everywhere have learned the soothing phrase, "that's nice dear" and returned to their chores.
Cultivating our own mom factor may be as close to 'the truth' as anyone is ever going to get. .
. A report on the rising number of aging and infirm inmates in prison suggests, between the lines, that someone who is elderly, infirm and poor might receive better treatment if s/he bludgeoned or shot a next-door neighbor to death and then went to jail. .
While it's true that SOPA & PIPA were recently shelved (not out of the minds of lobbyists yet - lobbyists are still being handsomely compensated for trying to resurrect this assault on the internet), it is not "because" any one individual "at his blog" "did" anything.
Symbolic gestures against something or for a cause are just that. Symbolic. Amnesty International has had the success it has because they stumbled upon the same thing that Joseph Stalin did: one death, one atrocity is horrible, but a million deaths are just a statistic.
I could see giving them money. But the nuts and bolts of effective action is actually organizing, planning, preparation, andexecution. (Though not the kind that Amnesty International opposes, of course) That takes work, whether it's action to do your j-o-b or action to make that utopia on earth you've always dreamed about.
Yeah, the Reverend Fisher is sometimes a cause billboard. And I'm just a guy writing the blog at the moment, inter alia. There's bigger work to be done.
. At a memorial service, longtime Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was eulogized in front of 12,000 mourners. Paterno, who died Sunday, had been fired for not doing enough in the sex-abuse scandal that has rocked the fabled football team. An undercurrent of seething anger at Paterno's treatment by the university was palpable at the service. Joe was a legend. Joe was a man of stature and character. Joe deserved better. Tarnish the belief system at your peril!
Messing with people's beliefs -- suggesting those beliefs might be less than complete or downright corrupt -- brings down the wrath of God. Circle the wagons. Protect the sanctified. Kill the messenger. The good outweighs the bad ... protect and extol the good!
At the Vatican, an archbishop was shipped out after detailing the corruption rife within the awarding of Vatican contracts. Everyone had been content with the status quo. Nepotism played a role. Everyone made money and there was a lot of money to make. Kill the messenger.
All this is easy-peasy on the social front -- being aghast at the worm in the apple, trying desperately to retie an untied shoe lace. But I think the same problem can be found closer to home -- within ... building, brick by believable brick, some structure which is honorable or good or sustaining only to come upon the stumbling block that runs amok with allegations/facts that assert that what can be very, very good can also be the source of what is very, very bad. How hard it is, after all that sweat, to find that the temple is built on sandy soil.
And the more virtuous the enterprise, the fiercer the battle to maintain and protect ... to revile and discount the sandy soil. What is good is good, period. What is bad is bad, period.
Socially, personally, what a difficult and arousing thing it can all be.
Socially, personally ... what a lot of complex tears can be shed; what a lot of defensive maneuvering can be employed. And how infuriating to have to concede that my complex and adorable temples can be summed up by anything as mundane as a bumper sticker:
. "Salvation" is a word I use very reluctantly. It means too many different things to too many different people and most of those meanings strike me as more imaginative and thus debilitating than they do as providing a clear indicator.
But for all that, in my heart of hearts, I guess I do think "salvation" means something and is worth attending to ... even if I can't define it adequately and get pretty testy when I or others try. Or anyway that's what I think today: There are salvations in people's lives... good, bad or indifferent, still, salvations.
After sitting around gabbing with three other people participating in "The Wisdom Project" yesterday, Carl (Karl?), one of the participants, button-holed me as I was about to leave the senior center where the conversation took place. We sat in the lobby of the center.
Carl is a lanky, angular man in his 70's, I'd guess. His face is relaxed and gentle, as is his way of presenting things. His tone is upbeat, but not sappy ... Carl has been to hard places and yet smiles ... not the sappy and desperate smiles of someone who fears something and longs to overcome the harshness, but the smile of someone who has come out the other side and chooses.
Carl grew up in Holyoke, a nearby community known for its Irish Catholics and its blue collar history -- a history that once meant the paper industry. When Carl was about to graduate from high school, he received a full scholarship to college. His stepfather, however, had four daughters to provide for and he yanked Carl off the college path, took him to a local Veterans Administration hospital, and signed him up as a bricklayer's apprentice. His stepfather also took Carl's wages and applied them to his abundant family. And now, so many years later, Carl can look back and say, "I was a bricklayer."
Carl's two sons have done well -- one selling a company he started for $7 million and then moving to Switzerland to live with a Swedish wife. The other, not quite so enterprising, is nevertheless competent and whole. Carl is pleased, even if he mentions in an understated parenthesis that "there are no grandchildren."
The friendly gabbiness with which Carl delivered his tale was in some sense wondrous. The implications of one aspect or another were enormous, in human terms, and yet Carl retailed them simply with his gentle tone and no whining.
And in the midst of it all, there was his salvation -- or what I chose to think of that way. Carl plays mandolin, guitar, fiddle and bass. He loves "the old music" and gathers with several friends on Sundays to play and sing. He doesn't do blue grass -- it's too fast, he said. And occasionally he has to fill in on bass because the other fellow who plays it ... well, his hands get tired. For all the years Carl was a "bricklayer," there was music in his life. Music he loved. Music that loved him back. Music that carries and informs him to this day. Carl did not say he "loved" music. I said that. To say he "loved" music would be too fancy for Carl, too desperate, too pretentious, too talk-the-talk instead of walk-the-walk. To express too much gratitude for salvation is to give the things from which we are saved more power than they deserve.
There is music of a million million kinds and my hunch is that everyone has the capacity for a similar salvation -- not a gushy, frightened salvation of God or heaven or enlightenment or peace, but something steady and quite ordinary. It's so-what or what-did-you-expect in one sense. And in another sense, it's enough to bring a smile to the lips. It is a salvation that reaches beyond the furthest heavens and yet never gets out of the living room. It is timeless because, well, it's right now and what other possibility is there?
Carl invited me to one of his Sunday afternoon jam sessions and perhaps I'll go.
Illustration: Manjughosa on a blue lion with two bodhisattva attendants (possibly Prince Sudhana and Yamari, an emanation of Manjushri)
The Simile of Space
“Lord Buddha, space does not think, ‘What am I near to, what am I far from?’ Why? Because, Lord Buddha, a bodhisattva, a great being, practising the perfection of wisdom, does not think, ‘I am near supreme, truly perfect enlightenment, I am far from the stage of a disciple of the stage of a pratyekabuddha.’ Why? Because the perfection of wisdom is something free from such discrimination.”
The Perfection of Wisdom by R.C. Jamieson (pg. 97)
Written by Dalai Grandma on Thursday, January 26, 2012
The TED talks are as good a place to begin your study of humankind as any - all these highly motivated people! Motivated to do what? Anything from cure blindness in Africa to swim a specific body of water at age 60. The first you can certainly understand as a purpose in life, though it's going to run you into grave problems of overpopulation and famine. The second, well, maybe you can see the point, but I can't. I just never got into Amazing Feats of the Body. Yet I've seen a world enthralled by a similarly ridiculous contest of minds, chess between a snotty kid named Bobby Fischer and the world champion, Boris Spassky. This was decades before the personal computer could beat us all at anything. You wouldn't believe how interested we all were in this, because it had something symbolic to do with the Cold War. That doesn't exist now, either. You could say it never did, just an idea. Poor Bobby - his Wikipedia entry includes a section called "Sudden Obscurity." No kidding.
Inflicted as I am with shingles (painful) and depression (worse) - and who knows whether they're related or just different neurons colliding in the mix - I found myself watching a TED talk by someone on whether I exist. I won't name him or post it, because I've found it a bad policy in life for a little tiny bug to make an implacable enemy of a powerful person. But really . . . it was a tasteless porridge of Buddhism for Toddlers and modern science. But this guy got himself a PhD in philosophy and went on to make a career out of talking about this kind of thing and writing books about the rock-bottom-dumb questions of (Western) philosophy, which must surely be as dead as chess by (snail-) mail.
In that, a nerd sent another nerd a move on a postcard. A penny postcard. Nerd2 thought about it and made his move and sent a postcard. Try to imagine a world that slow. That was a world in which long distance calls cost a lot of money, and were only made in the event of a death. But you knew you existed and so did everything else, and it never changed. Every Sunday night Dinah Shore came out in what seemed to be the same prom dress and sang "See the USA in your Chevrolet . . . " and blew a kiss. She does not exist anymore, but are you telling me she didn't? I saw her.
You, however. No, according to this TED talk, you don't exist. I mean, what made you think you did? The fact that every night of your life you confront the same stubborn stupid oily skin? Your exact cowlick? The food trap between the molars on your lower left?
No, you're just a bunch of relationships, the way water is just a couple of hydrogen atoms mingling with an oxygen. So if you thought there was Evian and Yellowstone and the Baltic Sea, there was rain and ice cubes, think again.
There are opposing theories about existence, such as the belief that we are all ideas in the mind of God. I rather like that, but if I were an atheist, it would make me nervous.
