by Tang Huyen

Don't bother, they are all fluff. Just float with them
if you need to use them, otherwise float above them
all. Don't let them bind you.

Beyond the teaching in content, Buddhism comes
down to teaching one to soften one's concepts and
categories, to take them ironically, as they are good
servants and bad masters, like money. It comes
down to teaching one to stand back, take some
distance, relativise one's position and perspective,
and vary one's positions and perspectives just to see
how other positions and perspectives may look like,
so that one learns how uncertain and fluffy positions
and perspectives are, how much imprecision and play
(jeu) they partake, not accidentally but inherently.
They are slippery and elusive, and can't be pinned
down. If one is realist and literalist with them, one
gets lost with them, they lead one astray.

Buddhism teaches one to reexamine one's position
and perspective, to reconsider one's position and
perspective, so that one gets to know their margin
of imprecision, of uncertainty, of relativity. It is a
putting in perspective (mise en perspective). One
learns to make them fluid and flexible rather than to
congeal them into fixed frameworks, to take them
ironically and not seriously, suggestively and not
definitively, allusively and not realistically. One
learns to ride different and divergent positions and
perspectives without attaching to any of them. They
are means and not ends, temporary and not ultimate.

Don't bother, they are all fluff. Just float with them
if you need to use them, otherwise float above them
all. Don't let them bind you.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on January 6, 2005, in reply to a remark that Tang Huyen "clearly perceives all directions" while seeming "unsure" of himself. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

A miniature statement of Tang Huyen's pedagogical theory. The key metaphors: concepts and categories as good servants and bad masters, like money; positions and perspectives as having inherent imprecision, a "play" (jeu) in the mechanical sense, that the realist and literalist ignore at their peril. The movement Buddhism teaches — standing back, relativising, varying positions just to see how they look from elsewhere — is a mise en perspective: not the abandonment of perspective but the cultivation of lightness with respect to any given one. The closing formulation ("float above") condenses Tang Huyen's whole teaching in three words.

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

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