by Tang Huyen

"The Kingdom of Grace can be experienced but cannot be studied. Lao-zi talks of the abandoning of knowledge and learning. That's how it can be attained."

In Leibnizian terminology, there is the Kingdom of
Nature, and the Kingdom of Grace. What the scientists
study is the Kingdom of Nature, and even then they
only study of it what is measurable and repeatable,
with a preference (in that already narrow section) for
what can be fitted into a mathematical formula. So they
study only a small section of the Kingdom of Nature,
not all of it, and have no notion of the Kingdom of
Grace, which is open only to subjective experience
and not objective, intellective study.

In addition they study by drilling down and ignoring
everything else, with the result that they study less
and less, and a French humourist says that ultimately
they will know everything about nothing. But not going
so far as the humourist, it can be easily seen that with
the drilling down, less and less is focused on and more
and more is left out, so that what is studied can be
studied in something like obscurantism and the results
can be misleading when reintegrated into the whole of
what can be studied objectively — not to mention the
whole of the Kingdom of Nature, and not to mention on
top of that the Kingdom of Grace, which totally escapes
objective study.

Beyond the basic material needs, like food, clothing,
lodging, etc., what we humans wallow in is the
subjective and sentimental, and it is what gives meaning
(in general, not distinguishing sensible meaning from
intellective meaning) to us humans. Even in the Kingdom
of Nature, moral-aesthetic values offer us the greater
part of what it means to us to live, and they have no
objective counterpart to them, but are purely subjective
and strictly sentimental. Above and outside of the
Kingdom of Nature, there is the Kingdom of Grace,
which is accessible only to experience and therefore
purely subjective and strictly sentimental, even more so
than moral-aesthetic values in the Kingdom of Nature.

There is nothing real to pin it down to. Yet it is what
redeems the Kingdom of Nature, though both are more
like points of view than realities, and the Kingdom of
Grace has nothing real (in the Kingdom of Nature) to
pin it down to and therefore is not a reality, except in
the sense of something very satisfying subjectively and
sentimentally — more satisfying than anything in the
Kingdom of Nature. And it is nothing other than the
Kingdom of Nature experienced from calm, peace,
serenity, grace, all of which come to us for free when
we don't do anything, especially anything to deserve
them. It is the basal state, the default state, the state
that is always there, but it comes into play only when
we don't do anything, surely not anything like the
objective study of the Kingdom of Nature. If we want
to study something, that something is definitely not the
Kingdom of Grace.

That's the element of self-selection in studies. The
Kingdom of Grace can be experienced but cannot be
studied. Lao-zi talks of the abandoning of knowledge
and learning. That's how it can be attained.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 10 January 2007, in the "Stuck in reverse" thread, in reply to Keynes. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

A concise application of Leibniz's two-kingdom framework to the limits of scientific epistemology and the nature of Buddhist cultivation. The layered argument: (1) science studies only the measurable portion of the Kingdom of Nature; (2) even within the Kingdom of Nature, moral-aesthetic values — purely subjective — constitute the greater part of what makes human life meaningful; (3) the Kingdom of Grace lies above both, accessible only to direct experience, and utterly self-selecting against objective study. The closing inversion is characteristic: the reason the Kingdom of Grace cannot be studied is the same reason it can be attained — it requires the abandonment of the studying stance. Lao-zi chapters 19 and 20 provide the Daoist parallel (the same observation Tang Huyen develops in "The Do's and Don'ts").

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

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