by Tang Huyen
By nature I am a spaceshot perpetually lost in outer space and with no contact with reality, even less with the incommensurable richness of the sensible world.
Since coming to these boards, I have always claimed to float in outer space.
"By nature I am a spaceshot perpetually lost in outer space and with no contact with reality, even less with the incommensurable richness of the sensible world."
In January 1999, I wrote the following on talk.religion.buddhism, alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, and alt.zen:
"So instead of agnostic, one can say: 'reductionistic.' The Buddha radically reduces all thought to mere sensation, though he absolutely does not advocate sensory deprivation. It is in the state of non-mentation that one is most alive, because the past has been forgiven and forgotten, the future is not invoked in vain, and one receives the incommensurable richness of the sensible world in the present without trying to duplicate it with one's mentation, which would be like (to borrow from Leibniz) emptying the ocean with a spoon. It is a Buddhism where 'one holds no view on rebirth, not-self, emptiness, kamma etc (i.e. considers such ideas irrelevant),' for the simple reason that all views, all concepts, all doctrines have been released, period."
Citing the above, a contributor to this newsgroup sent me a private letter with the following content:
Dear Tang: Your words continue to provide a light for me, mired in the maze of mentation as I am. For the sake of clarification, permit me to ask a few questions relative to the notion of "the incommensurable richness of the sensible world."
First, a few relevant lines from William Blake: "I do not question my corporeal eye concerning sight anymore than I would question a window. I look through it, not with it." "Once the doors of perception are cleansed, we see things as they truly are, infinite."
These Blakean lines swarm around the notion of the "incommensurable richness of the sensible world," drawing me toward conclusions I can't yet clearly see. I suspect that the 'sensible world' you refer to is a good deal richer, deeper and more profound than the cauterized physicality Cartesian dualism carves out. I strain to describe something here for which there may be no language, but it is a felt sense that direct perception, or non-proliferative awareness-mindfulness of what IS, the utter given of the present, sensible world, bequeathes or substantiates a freedom that makes all the usual thought-generated categories (self-other, inner-outer, reality-illusion, etc.) irrelevant. One implication of this is that our existential situation, as human beings, may well be a bardo that always offers the exact prescription for our awakening, if only we are sensitive, aware enough to get it. No higher worlds, higher planes, supra-causal epiphanies necessary, for it is not so much a matter of seeing higher worlds, as a matter of seeing this world differently, i.e., without mentation, without proliferation.
One other point: Desirelessness. Can beauty be created out of desirelessness? I'm concerned by the fact that outside of Rumi (who seemed on fire with desire for God) and a few other poet sages, almost no presumably enlightened spiritual sage has written verse anywhere near as beautiful as that crafted by an Irish drunkard named Dylan Thomas. Just as there's nothing "wrong" with the sensible world, there may also be nothing wrong with desire. Perhaps desire and ignorance are the preconditions for creativity. I recall, by way of paraphrase, an extraordinary line from the Ṛg Veda: "great is the sacrifice of those who surrender all to awaken as saints and sages, this all know, but few know how great is the sacrifice of those who live and die in ignorance." Thomas was a lover of reality, Buddha a master of reality. Perhaps the infinity of suchness is that it allows for many different kinds of truth.
Below is my reply.
I am singularly disadvantaged in writing a reply to your queries. By nature I am a spaceshot perpetually lost in outer space and with no contact with reality, even less with the incommensurable richness of the sensible world. I write about what I don't know, pretending to myself that I knew it, but knowing full well that I don't know diddly squat about it.
I do know that Channists of old in China and Vietnam write great verses in Chinese praising the beauty of nature — the usual stuff, flowers, trees, rivers, mountains, birds, etc. They keep saying that reality appears to them in its full reality (sorry for the pleonasm, but it means something). It is no longer veiled, and they evidently mean, like the Buddha, that it no longer is veiled by mentation. It so to speak shines forth to them. Early Chan is an amazingly faithful interpretation in Chinese of the Buddha's Buddhism, and I am quite astonished at how early Channists can almost penetrate directly into what the Buddha means across enormous language and culture differences. Their poetry, and prose too, are very light, weightless, almost floating, very much the opposite of Western philosophy and theology and literature, in that they are not weighed down by desire. This quality is hard to describe, but if you can read Chinese, it is very easy to tell. If not, you can compare Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine. They are equal in rhetorical prowess, but the former is very light whereas the latter is famously heavy — not just heavy-handed, but just plain heavy and passional. A swarming sea of passion is how many readers take Augustine.
You say: "our existential situation, as human beings, may well be a bardo that always offers the exact prescription for our awakening, if only we are sensitive, aware enough to get it." I keep thinking about the Buddha's saying: "What and what they think about it, it is/becomes otherwise." Our thinking is good enough for us to survive and communicate (including the communication inside each of us), but ultimately is incoherent with itself and fails to correspond with the reality outside of it, and I keep reminding myself of just that. I never break through my thick and nebulous shell, but at least I try to remind myself that I am off reality by quite some margin. That is all I know about reality.
Regarding desire, the Buddha condemns it without appeal, and I agree with him, though of course I have no idea of what the desireless state is like. I know almost nothing about Blake and Dylan, and I suppose that whatever ideas they have will be condemned by any Buddhist sage as mere hallucinations. But almost my whole experience falls into that category, too.
Christians talk about humility, and to me the best humility is to accept God's gift in the raw, with Adamic innocence, and without perverting it with our thinking. As Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa says: "The being of each creature flows therefore in the most immediate manner from absolute Beingness, because it [the latter] is present equally to all (Fluit ergo esse omnis creaturæ, ab illa absoluta entitate immediatissime, quoniam omnibus æque presens est)." Letter to R. Sanchez, in Nicolai de Cusa Cardinalis Opera, Basel, 1565, 825.
Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2, 14 says something very Buddhistic: "Even if you were to live three thousand years or thirty thousand, nevertheless remember that no one loses another life than this which he is living, nor lives any other life than this which he is losing. So the shortest comes to the same thing as the longest. For the present is equal for all, and so what is passing away is equal; and this shows that what is being lost is merely a moment. No one could lose what is past or what is future. For how could any one deprive him of what he does not have? Always remember, then, these two things: one, that everything everlastingly is of the same kind and cyclically recurrent, and it makes no difference whether one should see the same things for a hundred years or for two hundred or for an infinite time. Two, that the longest lived and the quickest to die have an equal loss. For it is the present alone of which one will be deprived, since this is the only thing that he has, and no one loses what he does not have." Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, I, 310, item H.
Damascius, Traité des premiers principes, ed. Westerink and Combès, II, 165, uses Stoic terminology and thought to express the Stoic serene acceptance of things the way they are and sounds very Buddhistic: "knowledge is so to speak an assent (sunkatathesis) and a recognition (homologia, almost 'empathy') of each thing being what it is."
Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium I, tr. Hall, in Mateo-Seco and Bastero, eds., El 'Contra Eunomium I' en la Produccion literaria de Gregorio de Nisa, GNO, I, 80: "I refer specifically to the meaning of 'being' (ousia); he [Eunomius] should not bring forward differences of qualities or of characteristics, such as are apprehended about a being by the intelligent mind, which are something other than the subject itself. It is not differences of scents, colours, weight, potency, value or behaviour and habit, or whatever else is observed about body and soul, that are the object of our present enquiry. I am discussing the subject itself, to which the term 'being' (ousia) is properly applied, and whether it is distinguished from another being by any greater degree of being. I have never yet heard a case where of two things, both of which are agreed to exist, as long as both exist, one exists more than the other. Each of them alike exists, while it exists and because it exists, to the exclusion, as has been said, of considerations of relative value or sufficiency."
As usual, I am long-winded and quote tons of stuff that may or may not be relevant. But if you think about those wise sayings, you may get a bit closer to knowing what reality is, and if you do, please tell me about it. I crave it but never get anywhere close.
Colophon
Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on February 29, 2004. The core of the post is Tang Huyen's 1999 reply (originally from [email protected], January 31, 1999, to talk.religion.buddhism, alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, and alt.zen) to a private letter from a reader, shared publicly here in the context of a 2004 discussion about floating and outer space. Author: Tang Huyen ([email protected]). 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 from 2003 to 2008, he was among the most rigorous analytical voices in the English-language Buddhist Usenet world. This post pivots on a reader's question — can beauty be created out of desirelessness? — and responds with a meditation on Early Chan's weightlessness, the testimony of Marcus Aurelius, Damascius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Nicholas of Cusa, and a frank confession of ignorance: the writer is a spaceshot who has never arrived.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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