by Tang Huyen

It takes technique to get beyond technique, and to get beyond technique
is the goal of Buddhism and Daoism. But if one can start right off with
balance and perspective, detachment and equanimity, one doesn't need
technique. It takes nothing, really. Less is more. Which is the whole point
of Buddhism and Daoism. Freedom comes free. That's the beauty of it.
Otherwise it wouldn't be freedom.

When one abandons chunking and bagging, even if
only partially and temporarily, there is no thing and
object, just content that flows on and on. There is
content — it's what happens — but what happens is
merely received and not interpreted, and in the
absence of interpretation, what happens becomes
different from what it normally appears, because
when the interpretation goes on, what happens is
strictly filtered by it, and one doesn't notice this
filtering until it is quiesced. Its absence is very
eloquent. The Kingdom of Nature becomes the
Kingdom of Grace, in situ, and this is what the
physicalists never get a glimpse of. There is an
excess — grace — that has to be experienced to be
believed. Just drop, drop, drop.

The raw content of what happens can go both ways.
It can go to interpretation, in which case it becomes
nature. It can remain free of interpretation, in which
case it is grace and stays as grace, for free. Any
experience, positive or negative, banal or exalted,
can belong to the realm of Buddha so long as one
experiences it and lets go of it. But the very same
experience belongs to the realm of the devil so long
as one takes it in affection or aversion, and even
more so if one takes it in affection and aversion in
the absence of mindfulness.

One can easily tell the people who have never started
Buddhist practice, regardless of how many years and
decades they claim to have spent in Buddhism. They
show no mindfulness, and they betray this fact by the
double fact that they easily and repeatedly become
uncentred and destabilised, and that once they become
uncentred and destabilised, they tend to become
more uncentred and destabilised, and so on and so
forth, in a self-reinforcing circle, which is the very
contrary of mindfulness. It all happens as if they had
reached a takeoff point in becoming uncentred and
destabilised and then there is no restraint any more.
In addition, they don't know moderation, they don't
know when to stop, both in intensity in the moment
and in length of time. They show no balance and
perspective, no detachment and equanimity. The fact
jumps right off the screen, year after year.

The French say that culture is what one remembers
when one has forgotten everything. In Buddhism
something as basic and necessary to cultivation as
mindfulness is a technique, yet it is so vague and
all-encompassing as to count on the level of culture
in generality. Standing back and observing in
balance and perspective is at the same level of
generality, and the people who stick their nose into
details and get lost in them never get a glimpse of it.
This, as contrasted with, say, the four form
meditations, the first three of the four Divine
Abodes (friendliness, compassion, symphathetic joy
— but the fourth, equanimity, is at the same level of
generality as overall balance and perspective), the
four formless attainments, the totalisations (e.g.,
contemplating the whole universe as earth or air or
water or fire), the meditation on public cases —
which are techniques. Shikantaza — "to manage
sitting only" — is something that is a technique and
at the same time at such high level of generality that
it is no longer technique, assuming that one can
actually practice it. When one can actually bring it
off, it is the same as non-doing (wu-wei,
an-abhisamkara), which is not technique at all.

It may take technique to get beyond technique, and
to get beyond technique is the goal of Buddhism and
Daoism. But if one can start right off with balance
and perspective, detachment and equanimity, one
doesn't need technique. It takes nothing, really. Less
is more. Which is the whole point (telos) of
Buddhism and Daoism. Freedom comes free. That's
the beauty of it. Otherwise it wouldn't be freedom.

Colophon

Written by Tang Huyen and posted to alt.philosophy.zen,
talk.religion.buddhism, and alt.zen on 27 May 2006,
in reply to an exchange on the nature of awareness.
The thread had begun with "jimi"'s account of a peak
experience and evolved into a technical discussion of
detachment, chunking and bagging, and the distinction
between technique and culture in Buddhist practice.
Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen was a regular contributor to Buddhist Usenet
groups through the 2000s, distinguished by rigorous
citation of Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese canonical sources
alongside Western scholarship. This post gives his fullest
statement of the technique/culture distinction and the
paradox of freedom: to seek freedom through technique
is already to have misunderstood freedom, which is
always and already available, for free, to those who
simply stop imposing interpretation on what happens.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work
Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

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