"So everywhere one turns, there is 'do this and don't do that', though such discrimination is only a necessary evil that is supposed to lead to the transcendence of any discrimination, including such discrimination between do's and don't's."

The paths of liberation known to me, Buddhism, Daoism, Stoicism, teach simultaneously a fully differentiated world with which one has to deal by means of discriminative thought and feeling (this is delusion or worldly truth in Buddhism, doing in Buddhism and Daoism), and the transcendence of such discriminative thought and feeling in something like equanimity and detachment or absence of discrimination (and this is called awakening or world-transcending truth in Buddhism, or absence of doing, wu-wei, bu-zuo, wu-xing, an-abhisamskara in Buddhism and Daoism).

On one hand in the ultimate state, they teach absence of discrimination and absence of doing (karman, deed or act, is doing, and awakening is absence of the production of deed), on the other they teach discrimination between what is conducive to such a state (the Way, Dao, the Law, Dharma) and what is conducive to the contrary of such a state.

In Buddhism, within the positive teaching, there is the discrimination of what is conducive to a good prolongation of faring-on (Samsara) and what is conducive to the stopping of such faring-on altogether (Nirvana). This last discrimination can be taken literally or merely as a manner of speech, in that faring-on is only the continuation of suffering and Nirvana the ending of suffering, with past and future lives not entering into consideration. At any rate a black deed leads to an unpleasant result, a white deed leads to a pleasant result, and a neither-black-and-white deed is the destruction of deed, and leads to no result (leads to liberation). Liberation is beyond good and evil, merit and demerit.

For those (in Buddhism and Daoism, they are explicitly reckoned to be few) who want to transcend the world, various methods are taught, and some methods are claimed to be more effective or faster than others. And there are always things to avoid (discriminative thought and feeling, for example).

So everywhere one turns, there is "do this and don't do that", though such discrimination is only a necessary evil that is supposed to lead to the transcendence of any discrimination, including such discrimination between do's and don't's, or to the state wherein "all things being equal, that is the Way".

The Old Man (Lao-zi) teaches the "returning to the root" (guei-gen) and the "acceptance of fate" (fu-ming) (16). He uncompromisingly rejects formality and externality, including knowledge and learning, and minces no words about it. "Doing away with learning, one does not worry" (20). "When one studies, one's learning benefits daily; but when one practices the Way, one whittles down [learning and knowledge] daily, and after whittling [them] down, one whittles [them] down some more, until one gets to not-doing" (48). "Eradicate saintliness, forsake knowing" (19).

Clearly enough, he teaches "do this and don't do that", though of course in the end (telos) that he advocates, if one does his do's (like whittling down knowledge and formality) and doesn't do his don't's (like feeding knowledge and formality), there will be no more discrimination between this and that.

As to "infinity boggles my mind" — that applies only to the discriminative mind. The mind that takes all in equally is not boggled by anything, even as it gorges on the incommensurable richness of pure reception. All is pure grace. In the absence of resistance (and this is defined as liberation) all is grace. And mentation (discriminative thought and feeling) is resistance.

Tang Huyen — talk.religion.buddhism, 27 Oct 2005.
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