by Tang Huyen

They are not matter — what we deal with. They are manner — how we deal with whatever we deal with. There is nothing ethereal or esoteric about them. They are as up-front as anything else; only they are the manner we see, not what we see.

To the best of my knowledge, the Dao, the Law (Dharma),
Nirvana in Buddhism, God of Stoicism, God of Quietism,
etc. are not what we see and therefore cannot be pointed
at. They are how we see, how we behave, how we act
and react (or don’t act and don’t react) in the world.

They are not matter (what we deal with), they are manner
(how we deal with whatever we deal with). And that’s
where the difficulty in both talking about them and
transmitting them. The world hasn’t changed, only our
way of dealing with it has changed, and this change can’t
be pointed at, though it can be communicated in one way
or another.

By the way, there is nothing ethereal or esoteric about
them. They are as up-front as anything else, and not
hidden at all, only they are the manner we see, not what
we see.

Normally, in delusion, we build up an interpretative
structure to help us deal with the world, and this structure
helps us act and react faster and more efficiently in the
face of repetitive patterns, including danger of being eaten.
This interpretative structure however doesn’t merely serve
us as a tool, it imposes itself on us as our imperious
master, and all the above fancy names are ways of
putting it back in its place, namely as a servant of us and
not our master.

The main job that this interpretative structure does is to
resist what happens and force it into preconceived
patterns, which roughly converge around self-defence
and self-preservation, and all of the above methods free
us from it so that we can take what happens without
resistance, or at least with as little resistance as our
situation can afford. They all help us open ourselves up
to what happens and abstain from throwing ourselves
as a monkey wrench on its way. But how does one show
others to do that?

[The following is a repost appended by Tang Huyen for context — originally sent to alt.zen, alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, talk.religion.buddhism, and alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan on January 11, 2003.]

You are in the right direction, Don sweetie, but I’d suggest that your idea
needs some refinement.

o/Brian: «Is it thinking that recedes into the background?»

Don: «Yes, if you change your focus. For most people the relationship of
awareness is slave/master with awareness being the slave and thinking the
master, as in if you have two hard drives on your pc, the one that is always
active is the master drive and you have to set the jumper switch to make it
that way. In our minds we have to reset the jumper on those two aspects also,
and that would be called awakening.»

I have no quarrel with situating our thinking (actually, our whole range of
reacting, including intellective and affective reactions and whatever else) as
a mere viewpoint, a sheer perspective, in proportion to some bigger and vaster
scope, which to you is awareness, but that is not the whole of Buddhist
awakening.

It is true that on the Buddhist path, one learns at once to widen the scope of
one’s attention and to “place” it in a wider panorama (in a movement of
doubling the scope of one’s attention), thus relavitising it and trivialising
it (because now it is seen as enclosed in an enclosure within another
enclosure), and making it less susceptible to being used as identification. In
a sense, this relativising makes one break loose from a tight identification
with normal (focussed or unfocussed) attention and “float” one’s attention in
an ever wider scope, and the Buddhist path teaches one to do that, but the
Buddhist path also leads one further, to bigger and better things, namely to
drop all perspectives and viewpoints in toto.

In Buddhist training, one reorients one’s thinking so as to enlarge one’s
perspective and take into consideration larger schemes of things — and the
largest scheme of things is the Law (Dharma). One tries to loosen up the usual
selfish motives and intentions particular to one and apply the universal
patterns — and the largest pattern of things is the Law (Dharma). In that way,
one loosens up the traps of the self (including the various mechanisms of
attention and inattention), softens them up, drops them bit by bit, and finally
drops them and the self as a whole.

Thus there is the distinction between enlarging one’s perspective and adjusting
it to the Law (Dharma) on the path, and dropping it totally to attain the
end-goal of awakening, whereupon one’s acts are mere reactions to the
situation, solely myopic, purely ad hoc, strictly particular, with no universal
to offer one solace.

The Buddhist path has the vexing characteristic of teaching one to commit
oneself just enough to learn how to uncommit oneself to all structures and
frameworks, to extricate oneself from them all, including the Buddhist Law
(Dharma), which is supposed to be the highest and most universal of all
universals. And on top of that, once one has verified it, one drops the whole
Law (Dharma), because one has verified it in the body (the Buddha says: kayena
“by the body”).

So the Law (Dharma) teaches us to free ourselves from all universals —
including it as (presumably) the highest and most universal of all universals —
and content ourselves with the mere particulars, so that our acts are mere
reactions to the situation, solely myopic, purely ad hoc, strictly particular,
with no universal to offer us solace.

Paradoxically, another way of saying the same thing is that one empties oneself
out in favour of the Law so that the Law acts one, on one’s behalf, though
there is no mooring down, no settling into, just spontaneous movement without
any self in there.

That is what the Buddha means when he says that the consciousness of the freed
people is unestablished, unsupported — it has no universal to moor itself to.

In addition, to me, the only difference between the two truths or realities,
conventional and ultimate, is the presence or absence of desire and therefore
of its products, like mentation and the self. The object of perception is the
same, only the interpretation by desire and its products, like mentation and
the self, is the difference and makes the difference. There is no other
difference.

The underlying object of perception is the same, what the Tibetans call the
established base, which is the whole, uncut field of sensation as received in
sensation.

That whole, uncut field of sensation is ultimate reality, and it is of one
piece, though fully differentiated. The cut-up, processed bits from it
constitute conventional reality. One bit is birth, another bit is death, one
bit is a table, another bit is a chair, they are delineated and demarcated from
that whole sense-field, and therefore belong to ultimate reality, if they had
not been cut off, delineated, demarcated, named and mentated.

Without our mentation, reality still goes on just as usual, and in it there are
processes that, by mentation, we call birth and death, table and chair. But
that doesn’t make birth and death, table and chair purely conventional. The
background is unchanged, by reference to which we cut up some bits, delineate
them, demarcate them, name them “birth” and “death”, “table” and “chair”, just
that it goes on without our cutting up, delineation, demarcation, naming,
etc.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on July 12, 2004, in reply to a thread on the Dao, desire, and pointing at the ineffable. Interlocutors: zero and Noah Sombrero. Author: Tang Huyen (Laughing Buddha, Inc.). Message-ID: <[email protected]>. Appended repost: originally sent to alt.zen, alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, talk.religion.buddhism, and alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan on January 11, 2003 (“Foreground and Background”), in reply to Don James and Brian Mitchell.

The 2004 framing articulates what the great liberation traditions — Daoism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Quietism — have in common at the level of function: not a new object to perceive, but a new manner of perceiving. The distinction “matter vs. manner” maps directly onto the two-truths framework: the world (matter) is unchanged; what changes is the interpretive structure’s relationship to us — from master back to servant, and then dissolved altogether. The 2003 repost elaborates the paradox of the Buddhist path: one must commit to the Dharma just enough to learn to uncommit from every structure including the Dharma itself. The freed mind is “unestablished, unsupported” — it has no universal left to moor to, and its acts are purely particular, ad hoc, myopic.

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

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