by Tang Huyen

In December 2004, Tang Huyen posted to talk.religion.buddhism in response to a musician's observation that genuine playing requires inner stillness — that without peace with oneself, spiritual practice produces only "dryness." Tang Huyen extended the observation into a diagnosis of a pattern he had witnessed repeatedly on the boards: practitioners who launch decades of mental culture not to know themselves but to avoid doing so, who construct a fortified castle of presumable spirituality over a foundation of unaddressed self-rejection, and who one day crash irreversibly when a single event brings the castle down.

I agree, and if it's already true in music, it is even more true in spirituality. Some people launch into heavy-duty mental culture without ever asking whether they're ready, and to me readiness is signalled by peace with oneself, reconciliation with oneself.

Otherwise one simply denies or negates oneself, and one then lays a thick layer of presumable spirituality on top of it, which does not help one attain to peace with oneself but only compounds the problem (lack of peace with oneself, denial of who one is and what one does, etc.) by helping one to ignore one's problem (the inner struggle, the strain of fighting with oneself within oneself) further.

On these boards there are people who devote years and decades to mental culture, whether under teachers or on their own. They started out years and decades ago with severe self-denial and self-rejection, and over the intervening years and decades their devotion to mental culture of whatever kind simply detracted and distracted them (which was precisely their intention) from mending their problem.

One day something happened that triggered a massive reaction on their part, as it finally woke them up to their self-denial and self-rejection, and boom, they crashed and never recovered.

They could have spent some time and effort over the years and decades coming to know themselves, to recognise themselves as to who they were and what they did, but they expressly forbade themselves from doing so, from getting to know themselves in an open and honest manner. They could run but could not hide, especially from themselves, and something or another would one day force them abruptly to face themselves, without the comfort of time and leisure, and they're gone, for good.

The fortified castle that they built over the years and decades to defend themselves from themselves and protect themselves from themselves took lots of painful efforts to maintain, but it would take one single event to shake it to its foundation and crash it irreversibly. Once that happened, they're naked to themselves, suddenly, and nothing and nobody can help them deal with themselves, because they have never learnt to deal with themselves in the first place, regardless how old they are. Over the years and decades they'd strenuously built a lily-white self-image that contradicted themselves almost across the board, item by item, right down the line, and now it all crashed in an instant and they are left with themselves, as they really are, without excuse and defence.

As you say, there's no substitute for practice but if the ground isn't fertile it has little or negative effect, so their years and decades of mental culture didn't bring any lasting result, like peace with themselves and reconciliation with themselves (which were exactly what they avoided at all costs), just a thickening of the defence wall that blocked themselves from themselves and hid themselves from themselves, as if they had been the most evil people to disgrace the face of the earth.

Colophon

Originally posted to talk.religion.buddhism by Tang Huyen, December 19, 2004. Message-ID: <1103495750.c1e0e79513053087ff6ee61774bc9976@bubbanews>.

Tang Huyen was a prolific and meticulous contributor to talk.religion.buddhism whose posts constitute some of the most rigorous comparative Buddhist philosophy in the Usenet archive. This essay diagnoses a psychological pattern Tang Huyen observed repeatedly: practitioners whose spiritual culture functions as avoidance of self-knowledge rather than as pursuit of it. The image of the "fortified castle" — built at great cost over decades, demolished by one event — is one of his most vivid formulations of what goes wrong when the foundation is self-rejection rather than honest self-reception.

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

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