Define zen writing2/8/2024 ![]() The Origins of BuddhismĪll forms of Buddhism subscribe to the “middle way,” between the extremes of angels (deva) and demon (preta), ascetic and sensualist, and claim that supreme “awakening” or Buddhahood can be attained only from the human state.įundamental to Indian thought is the mythological theme of atma-yanja, the act of “self sacrifice” whereby God gives birth to the world, and whereby men, following the divine pattern, reintegrate themselves with God. The Taoist is one who has learned to let the legs walk by themselves. Wu-shin:i No-mind, un-self-consciousness, is a goal of Taoism. The goal is not to reduce the human mind to vacancy, but to bring into play its innate and spontaneous intelligence by using it without forcing it. ![]() God produces the world by making ( wei) but Tao produces it by not-making ( wu-wei), which is roughly what we mean by “growing.” Things are made like machines by being put together, or from without inwards like sculptures, but things grown divide themselves into parts from within outwards (garden). The word means a way or road, and sometimes “to speak.” The Tao is the indefinable, concrete “process” of the world, the Way of life. Taoism is an extension of this kind of knowledge, giving us a very different view from what we’re conventionally used to, and which liberates our minds from constricting definitions and identifications. We “know” how to move our hands, breathe, but we cannot explain how we do it. Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge and understanding life directly. They get a feel for music that’s only rivaled by jazz musicians.Ĭonfucianism concerns itself with the rules of life, and conventional knowledge. ![]() Oriental music is taught in a different style, where the student learns by listening to the performance of the teacher instead of reading notes. But what we have done is fixed and final. We define ourselves by what we have done, what we are feels fleeting, intangible. But those conventions are illusory, as evidenced by asking questions like “what happens to my fist when I open my hand?” One who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, but in the west, that is hard for us. Scientific convention says whether an eel is a snake or a fish, grammatical convention determines rules of language. Conventional knowledge is such because it’s based on social agreement as to the codes of communication. Taoism and Zen confuse westerners because we thinking “conventional” knowledge, what we can define with words. Writing about Zen is difficult since many “objective observers” “miss the point and eat the menu instead of the dinner.” The Philosophy of the TaoĪ way of liberation can have no positive definition, it has to be defined by what it is not, as how a sculptor reveals the image by chipping away what it isn’t.
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