by Tang Huyen

Even a concept is already resistance, and the idea
"self" or "I" is the biggest resistance of all.

I beg to disagree, and I disagree thoroughly. Chan
and Buddhism seek to go beyond language and
thought, beyond existing structures and frameworks,
to drop them and be free of them, and what comes
to mind then is what is not known before. Language
and thought, structures and frameworks all try to fit
the unknown into the known, even if they attempt to
modify themselves a little to fit the newly known
better than before. But they as a block represent
resistance, congealed resistance, and Chan and
Buddhism aim to get over the resistance, to dissolve
the resistance and to accept what happens in the
raw, in total openness and without resistance. Even
a concept is already resistance, and the idea "self"
or "I" is the biggest resistance of all.

One doesn't think anything as anything, doesn't frame
anything into anything. Such is humility — absence
of self — fulfilled.

It is true that such openness and absence of
resistance are possible only in meditation, and that
if one is to do anything, even down to walking, one
has to reactivate one's mentational apparatus, but
now it is thin and not thick, transparent and not
opaque, flexible and not rigid.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on January 14, 2005, in reply to Sid (Ch'an Fu) quoting Robert Pirsig: "The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there." Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

A short but complete rebuttal. Pirsig's formulation implies that practice is essentially the application of an existing framework — you bring what you have, and that is what you find. Tang Huyen refuses this: the entire point of Chan and Buddhism is the dissolution of existing frameworks, not their refinement. Language and thought, as a block, are congealed resistance. The mentation that remains after practice is not "the Zen you brought" in any meaningful sense — it has been thinned, made transparent, made flexible. The self and "I" as the greatest resistance is a recurrent Tang Huyen theme; here it appears in compressed form as the antithesis of humility (absence of self = humility fulfilled).

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

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