by Tang Huyen

Once one sees through language and thought and
knows how to treat them as fluff, one is free to play.

In Buddhism, one learns to treat everything as fluff
and not to attach oneself to anything, especially
words, and especially the words "self" and "I". Once
one sees through language and thought and knows
how to treat them as fluff, one is free to play.
Buddhist scriptures abound with jokes, and even
with direct and uninhibited talk about play or disport
(līlā, vikrīḍita), and strangely, it is often mentioned
alongside the concentrations (samādhi). For example,
Conze, Large Sutra, 148: "The Lion's Play: As a
result of having stood firm in this concentration,
one can play with all the concentrations." "To play
with the concentrations" is a consecrated expression,
in Chinese yóu-xì sān-mèi, yóu-xì zhū chán-dìng
(the two expressions mean the same thing).

If one knows how to play — that is, to play for fun
and not for keeps, in make-believe and not for real,
in pure assumption and not in commitment — then
one simply has fun and doesn't get hurt. One plays,
and one keeps distance, balance and perspective
whilst playing.

If one doesn't know how to play but takes things
seriously, especially words on the screen, one can
get hurt, and seriously hurt. Many people, with
years and decades of claimed mental culture, have
gotten hurt on these boards, seriously hurt,
permanently damaged, all for nothing, because they
take words on the screen seriously and personally,
instead of fluffily and playfully.

Nobody does anything to them, rather they do it to
themselves, of their own accord and from their own
side. Their suffering is purely self-caused and
self-inflicted. They use their interlocutors as tools
for their own self-destruction, and their
self-destruction can go on in front of the public for
years and years. They tear themselves up by
charging on the words of others, whatever the
intentions of the latter. But they have to reify the
words of others first, make them real and hard, and
then impale themselves on them, unasked. And then
they complain, all for the attention on top of the
self-caused and self-inflicted suffering.

It is the martyr complex. They martyr themselves
both for the suffering and the attention — for
personal reasons, and not for any cause or reason
that transcends them. Or, at most, they martyr
themselves for the leader of the herd that they
choose to identify with. There is collusion, in that
the herd leader uses the followers, and the followers
use the leader, back and forth, and they hold hands
to jump off the cliff. The loss of reality-testing,
individual and collective, is built into the package.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on January 14, 2005, in reply to a peacemaking post by RadioFreeOB asking participants to contemplate that after all the ego-bashing they would probably like each other. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The post's structure is a diptych. The first half recovers the canonical Buddhist theory of play: līlā and vikrīḍita appear in the Great Vehicle sutras alongside samādhi as descriptions of the liberated person's relationship to concentration itself — one "plays with" the concentrations the way a master musician plays with scales. Conze's Large Sutra reference anchors the claim. Play-for-fun (not for keeps, not for real, in pure assumption without commitment) is the natural condition of one who has seen through language. The second half is a clinical anatomy of the opposite: the reification of words, the impaling of oneself on them, and the collusion structure of the martyr complex (herd-follower and herd-leader using each other back and forth, holding hands to jump off the cliff). Tang Huyen's diagnosis is consistently Buddhist: the suffering is not caused by the interlocutor but self-generated through the act of reification.

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

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