by Tang Huyen

The traps we set up to catch what happens turn around to snare us. We are stuck with our baskets and cages, structures and frameworks, and can't get out of them.

Christian fundamentalists say: "That's the way it is, like it or not."

We humans are thrown into the world, to deal with the world and ourselves, and we learn many things after the fact. We try to get smart by making predictions, and they do serve their purpose — but only in a limited and limiting manner.

The traps we set up to catch what happens or what may happen turn around to snare us, in that they bind us to them. We are stuck with our baskets and cages, structures and frameworks, and can't get out of them.

We then make the further error — a delusion by any standard — of taking our traps (our baskets and cages, structures and frameworks) to be the standards by which what happens should be measured, and if it doesn't measure up, we adjudge it ahead of time to be impossible, that it can't happen.

The Buddha's prime message is that such is the exact way to create suffering for ourselves, to inflict suffering on ourselves, all for nothing. And contrariwise, that if we but relax our traps — our baskets and cages, structures and frameworks — and even let go of them, we alleviate the suffering that we create for ourselves and inflict on ourselves, even end it. Both alternatives work in closed circle.

So his message is to relax and even let go of our a priori and to open ourselves up to the a posteriori, to what happens. And this relaxation and opening may be tumultuous and unpredictable. And the tumult and unpredictability are part of the joy of it.

To try to get it down pat by our traps — our baskets and cages, structures and frameworks — may be fruitless and even counterproductive. Our traps may railroad us into delusion and keep us there — it's their way of keeping themselves intact and in control.

It would be best to directly engage in the path found by the Buddha (and he finds it after the fact) and check whether it works. And the more we verify that it works, the more trust we grow in it, and the more energy we can devote to it without fear of failure.

This dialectical development — a virtuous circle — with some initial Sceptical suspension of judgements is all it takes. (Though it may lead you to total or near-total suspension of judgements.)

The Buddha's teaching is supposed to be "come and see" (ehi-passika, come-and-see-ish). And you haven't to wait until after death to verify it.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on April 1, 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 short post is one of his clearest statements of Buddhist epistemology: our conceptual frameworks are traps that generate suffering precisely by pretending to be standards of measurement, and the Buddha's answer is not a better framework but a direct invitation to verify for oneself.

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

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