by Tang Huyen

"In the seen there will be just the seen." Why bother with anything else?

If one takes something to be a problem, then it is a problem, but it takes thought to bring that whole scene up. If one merely relaxes and accepts everything, then there is no problem, and if one relaxes enough, thought may or may not arise at all.

That night, the Buddha relaxed all the way, spontaneously quiesced his thought, and poof, all his problems disappeared on their own accord. He did not solve them in the positive, for to do so would imply to take them seriously, on their own terms, and he had devoted the previous six years to just that mindset, blowing up the problems out of all proportions, magnifying them to their logical end, and glorifying them as solutions — the Jaina regimen of self-mortification and self-starvation testified to that unforgiving ideology. When he realised that such wholesale arsenal of gory self-repression and self-denial had been a total error, he relented, took milk (which led his five fellow Jaina monks to think that he had fallen, more specifically fallen back to luxury, and after his awakening they would become his first five disciples), and relaxed. He didn't do anything in the positive, didn't exercise thought to find solutions to his problems, but merely relaxed, went all the way in that direction (which was the exact opposite to his strenuous, unrelenting exercise of the previous six years), and awoke.

He first decided to enjoy his awakening in peace and quiet, then reversed himself and wanted to teach the few with but a little dust in their eye, and he was very pragmatic in his teaching.

He did talk about exerting total control over thought, being able to think what one liked and not thinking what one did not like. He detailed the factors that would cause suffering in minute details, and specified the ways to fight them, also in minute details. Mindfulness was deployed to be mindful of infractions and to correct them, in total concentration. This was his obsessive-compulsive side, which in some way was in continuity with his "control freak" side that had been in control during his six years of hard penance.

Somewhere in the middle of his teaching, he also presented a totally opposite picture. He usually taught the above stuff, at the first level, but at one time went one level up, performed a "higher critique" of his usual teaching, and said: "self and what belongs to self are unobtainable and cannot be made known as real and established in the present things, the views, fetters and latencies in the mind are unobtainable and cannot be made known." This takes all thing-events to be fluffy, slippery, unobtainable (they cannot be got at). Since they cannot be pinned down, the only possible thing to do about them is to be serene and let them be. If the views, fetters and latencies in the mind are unobtainable and cannot be made known, how can one cleanly and accurately map something into awakening and something else into delusion?

Later, the Diamond scripture says: "The past thought cannot be got at, the present thought cannot be got at, the future thought cannot be got at." If the past thought cannot be got at, the present thought cannot be got at, the future thought cannot be got at, how can one cleanly and accurately map something into awakening and something else into delusion?

What good boxes are for? If so why should one insist on being right? On what basis?

In Buddhism, from the Buddha on down, it is said that "All support is unsupported", "All foundation is unfounded", "All basis is baseless", "All establishment is unestablished", "All ground is groundless", "All bottom is bottomless". One drops everything and walks free. It takes nothing and leaves nothing. There is no truth to truth, otherwise truth would be encumbered with truth.

Bodily suffering cannot be avoided, but mental suffering is optional, and is largely self-inflicted. Aggravation brings no reward and only reinforces itself. Whining about suffering doesn't help one to deal with suffering at all, but just piles on more misery on top of the suffering that already occurs.

If I get Buddhism aright, one gets born, grows old and sick, and dies, but there is nothing wrong with those, they are only wrong if one takes them to be wrong (sorry for the tautology, but Buddhism consists in bringing into the open the tautologies that we create and whereby we inflict suffering on ourselves, for nothing). If one relaxes, one can sit back and enjoy life. One will suffer if one continues to force life to be what one wants it to be or thinks it to be, but if one simply lets it be just the way it is, without imposing on it one's view of what it should be (good, bad, just, unjust, etc.), then there is no problem.

Whatever life has to offer, one takes it, one takes what comes along, especially what one is and what one has, but without clinging to any of it and instead letting go of all of it as swiftly as one experiences it. What is negated is not life, but the grasping and clinging that make for suffering. What is experienced is experienced, not blocked out or distorted (many people spend the greater part of their energy blocking themselves from themselves and bending themselves strenuously to fit a certain framework, as if they were contortionists), but it is experienced in the mode of letting go. One just lets it pass, like water under bridges, and creates no problem thereby. Problems come from the resistance to what occurs, not in what occurs itself in the raw.

One doesn't try to fit experience into any framework, but lets it come just the way it comes and one lets it go just the way it goes. One doesn't try to bend it into any framework and doesn't try to freeze it into any stability. One just experiences it the way it is (yathā-bhūtam), not the way one wants it to be (yathā-praṇihitam) or the way one thinks it to be (yathā-cetayitam).

It is as if one pulled the rug from under one at every instant, without leaving any station long enough for any thought or feeling to take a stand on, for or against. As the Buddha says: "In the seen there will be just the seen."

All delusional activities are tautological and recursive, in that they stroke themselves to keep themselves going; and dismantling them is the job of Buddhist wisdom, which it does simply by dropping them, lock, stock and barrel, and that is how the knot is unravelled. To try to solve them bit by bit is to fall into their trap, which consists in taking them seriously and in their own terms. That merely reinforces them further.

In Buddhism, a problem is solved, not when one arrives at a solution to it, in the positive, but quite simply when one drops the problem wholesale and no longer mentates it, in the negative. Instead of dwelling on problems and thereby giving them weight and consistency, one does not regard them as problems, and thus drops them as problems. Poof and they're gone, for good. As if by magic.

In this light, Buddhism teaches us to strive only for one thing, the letting go of the past and the future, even the letting go of what happens right now, so that we do not identify with it, for or against, but just let it flow on, and thus do not create problems for ourselves, regarding it or anything else. In that state, we can amaze ourselves with the joy of the moment, yet not be carried away with it.

Yes, each moment can be joyous when lived in the mode of detachment and letting go, and no, we don't hang on to it — the moment, the joy experienced in it, or whatever else.

One merely opens up, and when one opens up, one does not know what it is that one opens up to. If one had a pre-conceived idea or concept or image of what it is that one opens up to, like Buddhist suchness or whatever, one would be closed and not open. When one opens up, one puts no condition on it, but merely opens up. There are no problems to solve and no solutions for them to be found. In the absence of slots to fit things into, such as problems to solve and solutions for them, total openness would take care of everything. "In the seen there will be just the seen." Why bother with anything else?

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on March 8, 2008. Author: Tang Huyen. 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 and related groups from 2003 to 2008, he was among the most rigorous analytical voices in the English-language Buddhist Usenet world. This post draws a structural contrast between the Buddha's two levels of teaching: the first-level mindfulness method (obsessive-compulsive, detailed, corrective) and its "higher critique" — the Diamond Scripture's unobtainability doctrine, where self and all phenomena cannot be pinned down, and the only response is to drop, not solve. The closing formulation — problems solved by no longer mentating them — is one of TH's characteristic inversions: Buddhist wisdom as the logic of the negative, not the positive.

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

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