Hello.
I wrote:
The ultimate gole of Taoism is to be as mindless as a rock.
And LITHIEN responded:
i beg to disagree with you on that. the ultimate goal of zen and Taoism
is to become one with all the consciousness of the universe including
the rock's, but more importantly transcending the rock's consciousness
as it acknowledges it, while we do not.
we see inorganic matter as dead.
sorry, but i couldnt let that go by without a response.
I was refering to an episode in the *Chuang-tzu* where Chuang-tzu says that
the most perfect expression of *wu-we* is a rock by the side of the road.
*Wu-we* is the goal of Taoism, genearlly interpreted as "non-interfering
behavier" or "natuaralness." In Zen, as well, a chief virtu is no-mind or
no-intenet. The Zen master acts completly atomatically, w/o thought.
Bill Bryson's latest bestseller *A Walk in the Woods* is his account of his
travels up the Appalatchin Trail (a 2,150 mile -- about 3,000 kilometers --
hikeing trail that runs up America's eastern mountain range). Bryson
describes how, when you've been out on the trail for a week or more you fall
into a completly atomatic, mindless mode. You do the same thing day in and
day out. In the morning you break camp, you walk all day, you make camp at
night. The next day you do the same thing. He says the fact that you walked 10
or 13 miles that day no longer has any meaning for you -- You could be walking
in circles and it really wouldn't matter to you: as Bryson says, you're not
really walking to get anywhere, anyway; you're just walking.
Bryson travels w/ a friend, Stephen Katz. Katzs is more out-of-shape and so
typically Bryson gets up ahead of Katz and then stops and waits for a while.
If Katz hasn't cought-up in about an hour then Bryson leaves his pack and goes
back for him, finds him, and carries Katz' pack for him to where he left his.
Now, at one point, when they'd been walking for a week and Bryson was
espically "zoned" he stoped and waited and didn't realize that over 2 hours
went by before Katz came up the trail. Katz snaped him out of his reverie,
when he came walking up, w/ torn shirt and bleeding. "My God! What happened
to you?"
Katz wanted to know how Bryson got around a huge tree that was over the trail
just a ways back. Bryson didn't remember any tree. Katz, believing him
disingenuous, describes that the trail was 14" wide, w/ a cliff on one side
and brambles on the other and a fallen tree across it that was too high to
climb over and too low to crawl under. This rang no bells for Bryson, which
ticked-off his friend.
"I was never entierly certain why he found my mentel absences so irritating --
whether he thought I was just being willfully obtuse to annoy him or whether
he felt I was unreasonably cheating hardship by failing to notice it."
(Bryson)
"The only fatal weapon to use against evil is to ignor it."
(Thoreau)
I would submit that this anicdote is much closer to the ultimate spirit of
Taoism and Zen than "becomeing one with all the consciousness of the
universe." Zen is not a pantheism. It is not that all is alive and consciouss
-- it's overcoming the dualities of life-death and conscious-unconscious. To
quote Muneyoshi Yanagi: "In Buddhist discipline, the central problem, the
problem of primary importance as well as of greatest urgancy, is how to
eradicate man's two most represenative forms of dualism -- the opposition
between life and death and the opposition between one's self and other; every
effort in Buddhism is directed to the solution of this problem." (*The Unknown
Craftsman*)
The rock is not alive nor conscious -- and neither am I. We are both
emminations from the Void, which is beyond such dualities. But (as Pirsig
would say) this is only good from the point of view of the Buddha. In the
everyday world on the street we may say that I am living mater and the rock is
not (Bio vs. InOrgPoVs) and that I have a conscious self/personhood/"ego"
(SocPoVs) and the rock does not.
TTFN (ta-ta for now)
Donny
homepage - http://www.moq.org
queries - mailto:moq@moq.org
unsubscribe - mailto:majordomo@moq.org with UNSUBSCRIBE MOQ_DISCUSS in
body of email
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:36 BST