by Tang Huyen

"Both the believers and the anti-believers accept such an all-encompassing ideology without question, the only difference being whether they accept it positively or negatively — as concave to convex, they fit each other, as hand and glove."

It is one thing to be inculcated into something that floats loosely (or densely) in your culture and society, like Christianity or Buddhism, it is something else to grok it and assume (take up) its whole ideology as one's own, even if in reverse. Christianity entails the theory of essentialist nature of thought and language, because God created the world (including us) in thought and language, in dead precision and dead finality, and the word "God" belongs to him as his exclusive property, with the result that if one goes out of thought and language (as in some mystical experience), one goes out of the realm of God altogether (one is a heretic), and that the word "God" has properties that are inherent in it, as inalienable possessions of it, just the way God instituted it, from its own side, whether we like it or not. We merely use words the way God created them and laid them down once and forever, and are not free to assign meanings to them the way we want, and we may not go out of the realm of language and thought, lest we fall out of God's realm.

Words have "word magic" — see C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, London: Kegan Paul, 1923, who quote the English proverb: "The Divine is rightly so called." Words and their meaning exist independently from us, and when we use them, we merely use them, and in doing so, we partake of God's institution of them, in flesh and blood so to speak. We become God's retinue.

The argument in the thread takes the word "God" to have inherent properties, and to be refractory to any attempt to mess with such properties ("You seem to be trying to redefine it in the running argument" — the attempt to "redefine" the word "God" is inherently heretical). The argument is packed solid with Christian "word magic."

It is funny to watch anti-Christian critics (they call themselves agnostics) rail against Christianity year after year, decade after decade, even as they grok the whole Christian ideology intact, including the above essentialist theory of words and of their meaning. People raised in a Christian world who don't buy into its ideology do not adhere to such a strict and unyielding theory of words and of their meaning, and to them the whole realm of language and thought can be conventional and nothing more. One can even drop thought and language altogether, even if only temporarily, but to the Christian believers, whether positive or negative, one single instant of getting out of the realm of language and thought threatens to pull the whole Christian ideology down, because such an instant creates a crack, and a crack in an all-encompassing ideology breaks it for good. Both the believers and the anti-believers accept such an all-encompassing ideology without question, the only difference being whether they accept it positively or negatively (just to be clear: both accept it, the believers accept it positively and the anti-believers accept it negatively, as concave to convex, they "fit each other", as hand and glove).

It is often said that the people who are very anti-Nazi are Nazis, that the people who are very anti-gay are gays. If you devote yourself to fighting something, you can well be that something. At a minimum, you let it define you, just as fierce anti-Christian critics let Christianity define them, frame them and box them.

Which is why Buddhist training in general and Buddhist awakening in particular have no content — temporarily, some methods (dharma-s) have content (the meditation of friendliness has friendliness as content, but one then contemplates it as impermanent, suffering, devoid of self, and lets go of it) — are content-free, are independent of content. They lead to openness, transparence, non-resistance, which are the contrary to any specific content but merely let any and all content show up without obstruction.

The very ideas of detachment, equanimity, non-resistance imply that if you fight something very hard, you identify with it and are it, the way fierce anti-Christian critics identify with Christianity and are Christians, regardless of appearances. The Buddhist saints do not identify with anything. Such non-identification is explicitly taught in the scriptures. Mindfulness is a good method (dharma) to disengage from any and all identification, including the identification as "I" and self.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 28 June 2008, in the "Reverse faith (was Re: An enabler with full stop)" thread. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The core distinction is between the essentialist theory of language (God institutedwords once and forever; the word "God" maps perfectly onto its referent; to redefine it is heresy) and the conventionalist theory (language is conventional, revisable, and finally dispensable). Tang Huyen's observation — that anti-Christians accept the essentialist structure even in negating Christianity's content — is one of his most incisive socio-religious claims. The Ogden-Richards reference to "word magic" is from their 1923 classic on the philosophy of language. The contrast between "reverse faith" (concave to convex, fitting together) and Buddhist non-identification (no content; content-free openness) carries the full weight of his comparative method. Compare "Canning a Surprise" (April 2008) on Buddhist training as non-doing, and "The Perfect Box" (July 2008) on the three worldview options.

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

🌲