by Tang Huyen

Awakening is the opening up of oneself to what happens without condition.

The Buddha says: "What and what they think it, it is otherwise."
Our concepts and categories, structures and frameworks work to
some extent to help us manage our complex lives and
environments, but ultimately on one hand externally they fail to
be adequate to what they refer to and on the other when pushed
far enough they run into internal contradictions.

This relativity extends to the norms and standards taught in
Buddhism, and the Buddha explicitly likens his teaching (Dharma)
to a raft, useful in helping us cross over from this shore of
suffering to the other shore of the ending of suffering but not an
absolute to be hung on to afterward — or ever.

For example, one can profess adherence to the precepts, to
non-violence, blah blah blah, but if one sees somebody raping
one's mother, what is one going to do?

In Nirvāṇa one quiesces one's mentational apparatus and stops
mentating, and at that time all concepts and categories,
structures and frameworks are in abeyance, though one needs
to reactivate them when one goes about normal life. But even
then one's mentational apparatus has been reworked to be
flexible and not rigid, light and not heavy, adaptable and not
unyielding, transparent and not opaque.

In Buddhist cultivation, norms and standards, concepts and
categories, structures and frameworks are gradually seen, seen
through, relaxed and dropped — though of course a new set has
to be worked out that allows one to live but does not create
suffering — and one's general outlook becomes more and more
open and flexible, not more and more closed and rigid. One
admits more and more ambiguity and tries less and less to force
what happens into norms and standards, concepts and
categories, structures and frameworks of whatever kind: moral,
social, physical, or otherwise.

A scientistic worldview — not a scientific worldview — which for
example restricts everything to matter (this is physicalism), would
seem from such a perspective to be a fool's voluntary prison, for
why would one want to limit what happens in its incommensurable
richness to just one category, matter? That would impose a
category — a mental category — on what happens and try to force
the latter into the former. On the contrary awakening is the
opening up of oneself to what happens without condition. At a
minimum awakening would increase tolerance for ambiguity.

A scientistic worldview would at once betray the twin absence of
openness and flexibility, and the twin presence of science
indigestion and science envy.

Norms and standards, concepts and categories, structures and
frameworks are all fluff, not something to force what happens
into. What happens can well take care of itself without us forcing
it into our baskets and cages. Which is what openness and
flexibility are all about.

Tang Huyen

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on May 24, 2005, prompted by a question about Right Speech and whether telling someone about a booger in their nose is right speech or noble silence. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The practical question serves as the entry point; the response is a philosophical account of the progressive opening of the cultivated mind. The raft metaphor is canonical Buddhist teaching — Dharma as a crossing-device, not an absolute — but Tang Huyen extends it to all norms and standards without exception. The quiesced mentational apparatus is not permanently abandoned but reworked: upon reactivation after Nirvāṇic experience, it operates with increased transparency, lightness, and flexibility. The critique of physicalism as a "fool's voluntary prison" is characteristically Tang Huyen: not an anti-scientific argument but an anti-scientistic one — the problem is imposing a single mental category on what happens, exactly the move awakening undoes. "Science indigestion and science envy" is Tang Huyen's recurring phrase for the unexamined adoption of matter-monism by Buddhist practitioners.

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

🌲