by Tang Huyen

"When we quiesce them, the Kingdom of Nature becomes the Kingdom of Grace, in place. Nothing has changed out there, and the only thing that has changed is our internal state."

We humans tend to justify and validate ourselves in whatever we are and do. This tendency to self-justification and self-validation is not limited to us as individuals, but extends to our thought and language, in and of themselves. They also tend to justify and validate themselves in whatever they are and do. What they do is to chunk and bag, and they tend to justify and validate themselves in what they are and do, namely chunking and bagging. There is a self-reinforcing tendency in there, in that we and our thought and language see ourselves and themselves as doing right in doing what we and they do. We and they see it as natural and right, the right thing to do. Thus we and they perpetuate ourselves and themselves, both in parallel and mutually, in that we perpetuate them and they perpetuate us.

Mental culture is in taking a distance to such self-justification and self-validation — not just by us as individuals, but also by transpersonal functions such as thought and language — and in developing an attitude to allow for what happens to happen without the imposition of language and thought, of chunking and bagging. The Old One (Lao-zi) teaches us to drop knowledge and learning, and he means knowledge and learning by way of chunking and bagging. Knowledge and learning not by way of chunking and bagging are fine, but how they work is very hard to describe, as it is outside of chunking and bagging, and what is outside of chunking and bagging is hard to describe by means of thought and language, as thought and language work by means of — chunking and bagging. The Buddha starts his teaching with two very counter-intuitive insights: the absence of self and the absence of the person. Both self and the person are very intuitive to us, because they are the basic chunks and bags that we use to define ourselves, but they are made up, composed, thought-up, fictitious, and not real and true. And of course they are made up by way of thought and language, of chunking and bagging. When thought and language, chunking and bagging cease, so do they. However to attain to such insights requires the stepping out of the circle of thought and language, chunking and bagging, a circle which is self-reinforcing unless we know how to deactivate it and undo it, though thought and language, chunking and bagging still have their use — they are of use only within their scope, which is the dealing with the world. It is when they run amok and overrun such limited usefulness that they cause harm, and the harm is that they make themselves our masters instead of merely being our tools.

When we put thought and language, chunking and bagging in their place and do not allow them to run us like machines, then what happens takes on a different light, a light that we would not suspect when we are constantly overrun by them. The world lights up, everything comes alive, even dirt comes alive, when it is not imposed on by them. The world is quite different when it is not imposed on by them, but such a state of affairs would not be even suspected by us — not to mention sought out by us — if we have no chance of stepping out of their self-reinforcing circle and seeing that they are not always right and useful. All happens as if Mother Nature wanted to justify and validate herself, but that she could not do it when they run the show and steal the show. When we quiesce them, then the Kingdom of Nature becomes the Kingdom of Grace, in place. Nothing has changed out there, and the only thing that has changed is our internal state, which is now pure of them, and such a change — which is purely subjective and strictly sentimental — brings about a huge change, namely from the Kingdom of Nature to the Kingdom of Grace, unasked. Which is how Mother Nature justifies and validates herself, in parsimony, merely by a small change in us. But for such a small change, she rewards us endlessly, in abundance and magnanimity.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 26 July 2008, in the "Voo-dooy / controlling interests" thread. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The "chunking and bagging" vocabulary is TH's consistent term for the conceptualising faculty — the mind's habit of carving the world into discrete units and labelling them. This post is the fullest statement of why the circle is self-reinforcing: both we and our thought-language justify each other in it. The Kingdom of Nature / Kingdom of Grace distinction — drawn from Leibniz and the theological tradition but stripped of its theistic content — recurs across the corpus as TH's preferred way of naming the subjective transformation that Buddhist training produces. Read alongside "The Change or the Changeless" (July 2008) and "Falsity to Truth" (May 2008).

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

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