by Tang Huyen

"He now realised that it had been an error, relaxed all the way, gave up thought and volition, did nothing, and awoke."

The most bang for the buck is gotten when one does nothing, abstains from oneself and lets nature act one. It is then that nature is most generous and munificent unasked, and bestows calm, peace, harmony, serenity, grace — all for one's doing nothing, surely nothing to deserve them.

All proportions being kept, it was what the Buddha learnt that night, in contradistinction to the severe and unrelenting artifice of the previous six years of intense penance, when he had tried to beat nature — his nature — down by sheer will, to impose himself, the image that he imagined to be true, on nature by raw force, in both body and mind. He now realised that it had been an error, relaxed all the way, gave up thought and volition, did nothing, and awoke. He had believed in suffering, had thought that it consisted in material particles that adhered to his body, had tried to beat them out of his body by the heat (tapas) of penance, and now realised that he wrought his own suffering in doing so — that he substantialised his belief in suffering by bringing out that very suffering by way of his penance. Therefore he now gave up on his belief in suffering and disinvested in it, and, in giving up his belief in suffering, he ended his suffering, so that both his suffering and his ending of suffering were affairs of a closed circle, of himself dealing with himself alone — nothing and nobody else were involved.

The reproach to those who fake liberation is not so much that they never practiced what they preached, nor even that they rather practiced the contrary of what they preached, as that they practiced artifice all the way — repressed themselves and resisted themselves all the way, just as the Buddha did in those six years of penance. Yet they never learnt the lesson of Buddhist non-resistance. Both the striving and the failure to surrender were entirely self-inflicted. Ironically, non-resistance should have been the easiest part, since it would have required doing nothing at all.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 19 October 2008, in the "A squeaky wheel gets the oil" thread. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The "closed circle" image is central to TH's account of the Buddha's awakening: suffering was not an external condition to be overcome but a belief maintained by the sufferer, and its ending was not an external event but a disinvestment by the same person. The penance years are read here not as wasted effort but as the necessary negative — the object lesson in what does not work. The Buddha had to exhaust all forms of artifice before he could recognise that the opposite — doing nothing — was what remained. TH's version of the awakening narrative is notable for its precision: it is not that the penance failed; it is that the penance actively perpetuated the problem, by substantialising through effort the very belief in suffering that effort was meant to dissolve. See also: "Error and Waking Up from It" and "The Great Ungelling."

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

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