by Tang Huyen

Those who have dropped all self-image and self-narrative either will have no reaction or laugh their teeth out at any attempt to get a rise out of them. They have no self to defend and protect. They have got over themselves and freed themselves of themselves.

"We have no way to speak or think about it without recourse to those stories" — a total circle.

You beg the question: why do we need to speak or
think about external reality (or internal reality, for that
matter)? We can simply cognise it in the raw and
leave it at that, in which case we don't need thought
and stories.

Of course we then don't know intellectively, but that
doesn't mean that we don't know anything. We can still
know sensibly.

As to "when I awake from this thought-filled life I
expect to understand that I was dreaming, not to
understand something about the state into which I
have awakened" — that state has no thought and offers
no intellective understanding of anything, itself included,
but afterward, in reflection (that is, with thought and
stories), you can perfectly try to strike up an intellective
understanding of it and compare that intellective
understanding of it to your intellective understanding of
states with thought and stories, like the one you're into
at that moment. Of course it will then be a memory,
but if you do it often enough it is not such a distant
memory.

As to "if being an interpretivist teaches you anything,
it is that people have many different ways of
explaining the world to themselves and each other" —
then you should give room to people who claim to be
able to receive what happens without laying an
interpretation on it, without weaving a narrative on top
of it.

I don't claim to be anywhere near there, but imagine
that the people who get there have the greatest
flexibility amongst humans. The main factor in
inflexibility is thought, though it takes more than
thought for inflexibility to set in. Without thought
around to fit everything into pigeon holes, there is
openness and flexibility, there is honesty because
there is no self-image to forcibly fit oneself into.

In life as on these boards, there are people who set
up untrue-to-fact narratives about themselves, so that
in their self-image they tend to be at antipodes with
who they are and what they do. The major part of
their energy is devoted to denying and repressing the
parts of them that don't fit that self-image and
building up fantasies that do.

In mental culture one has to perceive oneself as one is,
reconnect with oneself, accept oneself, reconcile with
oneself, set up a story that has some chance of being
factually true, adjust one's narrative to one's reality,
and then drop the whole baggage. If one can do the
latter immediately, that is all for the better, but usually
the preparatory steps are not dispensable, and one only
fools oneself when one thinks that one can skip them.

One easy test: when others feed back to one negative
reports and impressions about one, does one then get
"stung to the quick" and react frontally and massively?
If one has in any way attained to peace and
reconciliation with oneself, one would welcome such
negative reports and impressions, and even invite them
eagerly, so that one can improve oneself with their help.
They are for free, too.

Those who have dropped all self-image and
self-narrative either will have no reaction or laugh their
teeth out at any attempt to get a rise out of them,
especially in mere words on the screen. But of course
they'll welcome sincere negative impressions about
them.

Attempts to get to them won't get to anything or
anybody, because they have no self to defend and
protect. They have got over themselves and freed
themselves of themselves.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on June 8, 2004. Author: Tang Huyen (Laughing Buddha, Inc.). Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen was a scholar of Buddhist studies with deep command of Pāli, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan sources. Posting to talk.religion.buddhism and related groups from 2003 to 2008, he was among the most rigorous analytical voices in the English-language Buddhist Usenet world. This post moves through two registers. The first is epistemological: against the interpretivist claim that all knowing is narrative, Tang Huyen asserts that sensible knowing — direct cognition without thought or story — is real and available. The second is psychological: mental culture is a path from distorted self-narrative through honest self-perception to the dropping of all self-narrative, leaving no self to be wounded, defended, or deceived. The sign of the liberated practitioner is not indifference but a laughing openness to criticism, because there is nothing left to protect.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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