by Tang Huyen

"One drops one thing from one's tray, then another, and then the whole cafeteria drops out. The bottom falls off, there is no stand, and that standlessness is freedom."

Calming (samatha) is not exclusion. It does not push things off one's
tray at the top. It lets things go of their own accord. It is not made
aware of things by staring at them and then deliberately setting them
aside — one is clear (aware) and by calming. One winds down instead
of up, that is all. By letting everything pass (and not rejecting them,
repressing them, excluding them, or hanging on to them, dwelling on
them, drilling down into them), one clears out the space for freedom.
To use the cafeteria simile, but in reverse: one drops one thing from
one's tray, then another, and then the whole cafeteria drops out. The
bottom falls off, there is no stand, and that standlessness is freedom.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 5 March 2008, in the thread "Cafeteria Zen (was Re: Cafeteria Zen)," in reply to herbzet proposing the cafeteria push-down stack (LIFO buffer) as a metaphor for consciousness. Author: Tang Huyen. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

A short, precise correction of an analogy. The cafeteria stack as herbzet uses it implies exclusion from the top: remove one tray, another is pushed up. TH inverts the metaphor: Buddhist practice removes things from the bottom, not the top, until there is no stack at all. The technical distinction he makes — between deliberate exclusion (pushing things aside, muscular) and calming (letting pass without rejection, repression, or dwelling) — is a compressed restatement of TH's larger thesis about non-action: freedom is not achieved by force but by the removal of what stands in freedom's way, until the very ground of standing disappears.

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

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