Mon, 08 Mar 2010
Correcting mistakes
The pugnacious, but always interesting, Bill Scwartz misquotes the First Karmapa, saying:
As the 1st Karmapa Dusum Khyenpa put it, "To see the mountain on the other side, you must look at the mountain on this side."
The way I remember the quote, it goes, "To see the mountain on the other side, you must stand on the mountain on this side." Which makes more sense. If my memory is not faulty, the meaning of the quote is that to realize mahamudra (the mountain on the other side) you must meditate using the seven points of posture of Vairochana (the mountain on this side.)
Nathan, who I met at Khenpo Karthar's teaching on mahamudra in Crestone and at Thrungu Rinpoche's phowa teaching in Toronto, said:
Sattva is a Sanskrit term translated roughly as "one who walks the path of."
Sattva is best translated as "being." "Sat" is the Sanskrit verb that means to be or to exist and "-tva" is the gerund endig, which is "-ing" in English. So sattva is being, the act of existing.
Wed, 03 Mar 2010
Innate Enlightenment
If enlightenment is ours already, then why do we need to practice? Here's an analogy I've used before. If a jeweler is carrying a bag of gems and they fall out of the bag into the mud, he won't leave a single one of them behind or think that they've lost a single penny of their value. But he won't sell them until every last speck of dirt is removed from the gems. Practice is like washing the mud from the gems. Until the dirt is gone, the sprkle of the gems isn't seen. But the gem is always a gem, the act of removing the dirt deosn't make it a gem. Enlightenement is innate. It is not special ability we develop through practice. When we remove all our misconceptions, all our mental tics, we will discover nothing more than what we've always been. But that will be enough.
Tue, 02 Mar 2010
Perl and Mu
It's not often that I get to talk about Perl and Zen in the same post. The Perl 6 type system is unusual in that a class is an instance of itself. An undefined instance of the class is set to the class type object. This is done to give a natural way to handle class methods. The question then is what is the class of Nil, the undefined constant value. Damian Comway suggested that this be called Mu. Mu is also the base class of the object hierarchy in Perl 6. The name is a little joke. Mu was Joshu's answer to the monk who asked if a dog has buddha nature and literally means no. His answer is not meant to be taken in a simple literal manner, no as opposed to yes. Joshu's answer was given to cut off the monk's thoughts about buddha nature, to point the monk away from his thoughts and towards the real. There are different sorts of nothing, the nothing of the undefined value, the mystics' via negativa, and the nothing of emptiness. Nothing is always relative to the thing being negated. In Perl's case it'd defined values versus undefined variables. A variable is undefined between its declaration and first assignment. In the case of emptiness, what is being negated is independent existence, existence above the factors a thing is dependent upon. And in the case of buddha nature, what is being negated is all contingent phenomena. Emptiness and buddha nature are the two opposite poles of Buddhist metaphysics. Emptiness denies the real in what is relative and buddha nature denies the relative in what is real. Yet they are not opposites, they are poles of a single thing, not real because relative and not relative because real. Even Damian Conway couldn't top that.
Wierd stuff in the news today. A Buddhist nun discovers an udumbara flower under her washing machine. And a Hindu group is promoting a soft drink made from cow's urine as a healthy alternative to Coke and Pepsi. Maybe healthier, but I doubt it will be more popular.
