by Tang Huyen

"The false can lead to the true, but that does not make the false true. Usefulness is not reality."

You make the standard confusion between belief and reality. Buddhism goes out of its way to differentiate between them, even as it encourages some kinds of counter-factual belief as a method of liberation — belief that runs counter to reality but that fosters liberation.

In Buddhism, the effectiveness of a method (dharma) has nothing to do with its factual truth. The contemplation of the unclean is one instance where the object of contemplation is unreal: one contemplates for example the whole world as a skeleton. Of course the whole world is not a skeleton, but one contemplates it as a skeleton in order to cut lust. Now it may or may not work, and it is well-known that people can kill themselves in this kind of contemplation, but it does work for some people — that is, it helps them end their suffering.

So to contemplate the tears that one has shed in past lives may or may not help one end one's suffering, but even if it works, it needs not muster any factual truth to it. If it works, it works. When it works, it merely works, and needs not imply anything about its factual truth, beyond its working.

Xu-yun "Empty Cloud" was exhorting the monks to meditate hard, and he told them to "be firm in their determination to escape from the rounds of births and deaths." It does not imply that he took it to be factually true, but only that he took it to be a good method to rouse their energy to work on the speech-head (hua-dou). He might or might not take it to be real, but he knew that it worked — the way some people turn their clock ten or fifteen minutes early, so that they can slack off for that same amount of time and yet be on time. It doesn't mean that to them time is ten or fifteen minutes ahead, but only that they tend to wake up ten or fifteen minutes behind time.

Some exercises, like the totalisations (which include the Four Divine Abodes — friendliness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity), are pure fictions and great imaginations that attempt to encompass the whole universe. In the totalisation of air (or earth, or fire, or water, or green, or red, or a skeleton) one imagines that the whole universe is air and nothing but air; in the totalisation of equanimity, one imagines that the whole universe is equanimity and nothing but equanimity. One thinks up something abstract and spreads it to the whole universe. It is only a subjective feeling, and the universe remains untouched by it.

However, Nirvāṇa is similar in that it is only a change of the way one deals with the world, not a change in the world itself; the change is only a change in manner, not a change in matter. The difference is that the totalisations are pure impositions on the world whilst Nirvāṇa is total openness to the world without any imposition. Other than that, both are subjective attitudes and nothing more. But in that openness the world becomes different — the absence of imposition allows the world to light up on its own and transform itself from the Kingdom of Nature to the Kingdom of Grace, in place and for free.

The irony is that artifice — the make-believe, the voluntary adhesion, the placebo effect of exercises of pure fiction like the totalisations — can lead beyond artifice, outside of artifice, to the absence of artifice, namely Nirvāṇa. But that efficacy does not make such artifice true. It only makes it useful. The false can lead to the true, but that does not make the false true. Usefulness is not reality.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 31 May 2008, in the "Bhante G on Literal Rebirth" thread. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

A precise statement of Tang Huyen's pragmatic approach to Buddhist method: effectiveness and truth are independent variables. The post should be read as a companion to "Canning a Surprise" (May 2006) and "The Switch" (April 2008). The totalisation practice described here (kasina meditation extended to the Four Divine Abodes) is found in the Visuddhimagga and the Pāli Nikāyas; TH's insight is that the practice's soteriological value is orthogonal to its metaphysical claims. The contrast between totalisations as imposition and Nirvāṇa as openness is one of the sharpest formulations in the corpus.

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

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