Master Shexian Sheng said to an assembly,
Journeying Chan followers must be deliberate. Study requires the eye to study, the state of perception must find expression of the state of perception; only then do you have some familiarity, and only then will you not be confused by objects and not fall into evil ways. Ultimately, how do you understand? Sometimes expression reaches but mind does not - you mistakenly focus on phenomena that are reflections of thought about present sense data. Sometimes mind reaches but expression does not - you are like blind people touching an elephant, each describing it differently. Sometimes mind and expression both reach - breaking through heaven and earth, light illumines the ten directions. Sometimes neither mind nor expression reach - people with no eyes run hither and thither, and suddenly fall unawares into a deep pit.
He also said to an assembly,
The bloodline of the teachers of the school, the ordinary or holy, Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, heaven, hell, boiling water in cauldrons, coals of furnaces, oxhead soldiers of hell, myriad forms, sun, moon, stars and planets, other regions, this land, sentient beings, inanimate things (drawing a line with his hand) all enter this school. In this school it is possible to kill and also possible to give life. To kill you need a killing sword, to give life you need a life-giving expression. What are the killing sword and life-giving expression? Anyone who can say, come forth and try to tell everyone. If you can't say, you are failing your everyday life.
A monk asked, "If one has not yet understood oneself, what can be used as a test?" The master said, "Striking the signal to sleep in a bustling market place." The monk asked, "What does that mean?" The master said, "Lighting a golden lamp at noon."
- Treasury of the Eye of True Teaching (Cleary Trans) 316
"Striking the signal to sleep in a bustling market place." - sometimes mind and expression both reach.
Some people will say that this is just a test to see if you swallow bait without thinking, and that you just need to judge for yourself. What sort of fool is going to try sleeping in a busy marketplace? On the other hand some people will say it's just meaningless gibberish, that the Master knew he couldn't put it into words.
But the excerpt is about when mind and expression both reach. How closely have you looked at nonsense? How deeply have you considered what goes on when you don't understand? When you're searching these texts for the meaning, the instructions, the method or the solution to the riddle, so you can put an understanding into words and say the puzzle is solved, how do you deal with the admonitions about affirmation and negation?
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A quick diversion into some really basic 'formal' logic....
Affirmation is to assert the truth of something. "My dog is brown."
Negation is to negate the truth of something. "My dog is not brown."
Note that an affirmation is also the negation of a negation - "My dog is not not brown" is the same as "My dog is brown".
A tautology is something like 'it is what it is'. Proofs are not far away from this - we just show that given our premises, it logically follows that they imply the conclusion. It is also closely related to 'identity' which means 'equal' or 'same' in many ways - to phrase 'My dog is Holly' as an identity is to say that the terms 'My dog' and 'Holly' are identical, and in a simple logic system I can then replace any occurrence of the phrase 'My dog' with the word 'Holly' and it won't change the meaning.
A contradiction in logic is the same as 'nonsense' - like saying my dog is brown, and it's not brown. If we can deduce a contradiction using our rules of logic from a set of premises, then we've shown that the premises are inconsistent, and that's a way to defeat an argument. For example, 'reductio ad absurdum' is to reduce an argument to absurdity.
A paradox is different - a paradox says, 'If my dog is brown, then it's not brown. And if it's not brown, then it's brown.' A paradox is not a contradiction - it doesn't affirm the impossible like a contradiction, but there's no possibility that satisfies it. In human history paradoxes have been a great source of inspiration to thinkers, since when we 'see' them in nature it almost always hints at our misunderstandings. Why do stars seem to move closer to the moon when it passes by? Newton's physics didn't explain that - and people were perplexed by the apparent 'paradox' - until Einstein explained gravity as bent space.
Then of course you can join premises together with 'and' and 'or', and you can add operators like 'for all' and 'there exists' and 'possibly' and 'necessarily' - and you can create logical rules of deduction and substitution which results in different systems of logic depending on how you do that. This is where Aristotle and his famous rules of inference like modus ponens come into the picture. Basic prepositional logic was found to be isomorphic to set theory - meaning they're mathematically or logically the same, but use different symbols. Then along came Bertrand Russell and stirred up all sorts of trouble with Russell's Paradox - does the set of all sets that do not contain themselves contain itself, or not?
Does that remind you of anything? For logicians back then, they found themselves like a man up a tree holding on by their teeth, unable to answer without falling to their deaths.
My point here is that logic is like everything else in life - breaking it into pieces doesn't make it simpler. Looking closer at any of the pieces reveals more detail. People talk of 'common sense' but there isn't such a thing really - there's a lot of wiggle room in logic, and it's not as simple as people assume. One of my favourite questions from Foyan is, "How do you understand the logic of identity?" The fourth case of the Wumenguan is short and sweet, and also deals with this:
Wakuan said, "Why has the Western Barbarian no beard?"
Identity, affirmation and negation - when you look closely at them, you can see that they're not just simple 'common sense' things. Our different understandings of these things are part of what makes us different as individuals.
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You don't often see Zen masters say 'no, that's not right'. Generally they 'go into the weeds' with their students, taking on the assumptions of whoever they're talking to - after all, nobody can force you to think something. Also we often see Zen masters take on the words of the folks that speak to them. This is one way to ensure that at least one party is hearing something exact. You might not know exactly what someone means when they say 'clouds and rivers' but you know that they have some meaning, and if you also use the words when speaking back to them, those words will have the same meaning that the person originally gave them.
The killing and the life-giving - that all ties in with affirmation, negation, identity, and the seemingly paradoxical words of Master Shexian Sheng saying "Lighting a golden lamp at noon." Our ideas of identity and negation, equality and difference - these are functions of the mind. They can change, and when they change no 'thing' changes - but in a sense everything does.
Submitted September 07, 2020 at 05:10PM by sje397 https://ift.tt/3i6NXhh
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