by Tang Huyen

"If you keep mindfulness and contemplate impermanence, suffering, absence of self, even whilst going about your chores — you're doing Buddhism, in person. You're a vessel of the Dharma."

In Buddhism, there are the four reliances (not in Pali), of
which one is to rely on the Law (Dharma) and not on the
person (pudgala). The person can be whatever, but so
long as the Law that he transmits is good (namely, good
for helping one end one's suffering), one does not bother
further about him. He can be a thief, a whore, a
murderer, or whatever, but so long as the Law that he
transmits is valid for helping one end one's suffering,
one stops there and is grateful to him for transmitting
the Good Law.

In general, in dealing with whoever teaches us the Law,
we should care only about whether the Law that he
teaches is effective in helping us end our suffering. If he
can in addition help us in the practice of it, that is
wonderful, but if not, the Law that he teaches is good
enough, if indeed it is good in helping us to end our
suffering. All else is irrelevant.

That he has or hasn't credentials from prestigious
sources may or may not matter in the least, if he can or
can't help us end our suffering. A truly awakened person
can be a poor teacher in teaching others to get to where
he is (he can even refuse to do so at all, and that is his
freedom). A deluded fool can teach us to end our
suffering, or at least alleviate it, even when he does not
intend to do so — for example a drunk derelict in the
street who by his very example teaches us not to follow
him in whatever it is that gets him there. The late Hal
Hesse said that a bad teacher is wonderful, in that he
weaned us from seeking out teachers and instead
induced us to take care of ourselves on our own.

When we go to doctors, we expect that they are good
with mending our bodily problems. When we go to
dentists, we expect that they are good with mending our
dental problems. When we go to a professor of math,
we expect him to be good with math. We don't expect
them to be good with something outside their respective
area of expertise.

The Buddha, as he is preserved in the early canon, is a
good case of Expedient Means. He has two sides, one
of which is sober and straightforward (telling it like it is),
the other flamboyant, dramatic, Thespian (dressing it up
for effects, be they salutary), and eager to blow
everything all out of proportion to drive a point home.

In one place he says that all the compositions are
suffering and that Nirvāṇa is peaceful (so there is one
state that is not suffering, Nirvāṇa, because it has no
compositions); in another place he says flatly that all is
suffering, without exception. Such contradictions are
replete in the early canon, and they clearly reflect
different aspects of one and the same man, not a
quarrelsome committee.

Reading the early canon (and this applies even more to
the Great Vehicle) is a delicate balancing act. One has
to look at the whole, and then balance one part against
another part, and it is so much easier to locate the
former personality — the sober and straightforward one
— and ignore the latter. The former says "This is the
practice; this is what you do; this is why you do it; if you
do it, this is what you get." The latter is the origin of the
hocus-pocus tradition.

If you want to know which of the two prevails over the
other in the early canon, it is the former, the sober and
straightforward one.

In the Pali tradition, the commentary literature has
done its job, and the Theravada has largely inherited
from the sober and straightforward side, though
undeniably tinged by the hocus-pocus of the
Thespian side. In the Chinese tradition, the
commentaries are more prolific and more loyal to the
Thespian side, so there is more hocus-pocus in it.
In the Tibetan tradition, the hocus-pocus has gained
the upper hand, so that it takes a fine comb to locate
the sober and straightforward message underneath.

Let me be clear: in the early canon, the end of the
matter can be stated thus (though this is an
approximation): the path is very much a matter of how
one conducts oneself, the manner of one's
engagement with life, rather than what one does, the
matter of one's engagement with life.

One can be a monk or a layperson, a farmer or an
emperor, a poor man or a rich man, a married man
with twelve children or a hermit in a cave, and one's
path and one's chance and one's access to liberation
are the same, so long as one conducts oneself in the
right manner — live humbly in mindfulness, balance and
perspective, detachment and equanimity, and relentlessly
work at it. The manner trumps the matter, in the early
canon.

It is therefore not by accident that the monastic life is
formally considered (with certain exceptions) superior
to the lay life as a path, because monastic life makes it
easier to conduct oneself in the right manner and lay
life makes it much harder. But it is not impossible in lay
life, if one's circumstances are favourable, if one
secures a minimum base of support, or you earn your
living on your own and do what you want, like
cultivation.

In Chinese Buddhism, it is said: sui yuan bu bian, bu
bian sui yuan — "To adapt to circumstances but remain
unchanged, to remain unchanged but adapt to
circumstances." If you remain true to the spirit of
Buddhism, that's just about all that matters. If you keep
mindfulness and contemplate impermanence, suffering,
absence of self, even whilst going about your chores,
if you maintain detachment and equanimity amidst your
daily activities as they are required of you, if you keep
distance, balance and perspective, regardless of what
you do, you're doing Buddhism, in person. You're a
vessel of the Dharma. You're exemplifying the Buddha's
teaching, as an example to the world.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 27 January 2007, in the "Bitsy coherence (was Re: Reincarnation?)" thread, in reply to Robert Epstein. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Three major themes interlocked: the four reliances (cattāri paṭisaraṇāni) ground the teaching in early Buddhism's own epistemological principle — care about the Dharma, not the person; the two-sided Buddha reading opens a hermeneutic key to navigating the early canon's contradictions; and the culminating Chinese Chan formula — sui yuan bu bian, bu bian sui yuan — translates the whole into a practical daily prescription. The "manner vs. matter" formulation — conduct matters more than vocation — is one of Tang Huyen's most consistent and practically useful insights across the entire corpus. This post is among the most programmatic on the question of lay Buddhist practice.

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

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