by Tang Huyen

One learns to stop inflicting suffering on oneself from massively inflicting suffering on oneself, for nothing. Seeing the gratuity of it makes one stop it.

The Buddha was, if I get him aright, unhappy with family life, conjugal life, what in China was called home life, and did what was proper for such a feeling in India, namely leaving the home life to go forth as a wandering beggar (bhikṣu means beggar).

He intentionally stabbed himself with the severe double arrow of Jaina self-mortification and self-starvation, and was days from final success, namely death by starvation and exhaustion, when he suddenly realised that it had been a massive error (that was his first awakening). So he relented, took milk (a luxurious food, to a Jaina ascetic like him), regained strength, and awoke (a second time).

After him, Buddhist cultivators routinely stab themselves with an imaginary arrow, which is a reliving, perhaps only in the psychological plane, of the Buddha's years of Jaina self-starvation and self-mortification, up until the moment when, just days away from success, namely death by starvation and exhaustion, he realised that it had been a massive error.

It is standard in Chinese Chan to beat one's head for years and decades symbolically on a puzzle — a speech-head, a public case — that is fundamentally unsolvable, until one realises that it is fundamentally unsolvable, and that moment is called "destroying one's basic investigation".

One learns to stop inflicting suffering on oneself from massively inflicting suffering on oneself, for nothing. Seeing the gratuity of it makes one stop it. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." — Blake.

On top of that, it is emphasised that "the bigger the doubt, the greater the awakening", which is just a variety of the fire-and-brimstone sermon in Christian churches: the sermon beats guilt into its audience, lays it on thick, then lifts it (the guilt) by promising relief in the form of God's mercy. The bigger the guilt, the bigger the relief.

So Buddhist training, especially Chan training, is essentially the reliving of that massive, frontal self-infliction of suffering, the better to cure oneself of inflicting suffering on oneself. In order to end suffering, one stabs oneself with an imaginary arrow in order to be able to pull it out and cure oneself from inflicting suffering on oneself. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." — Blake.

In delusion, you create suffering for yourself; in awakening you don't create suffering for yourself. You create suffering for yourself by creating a self for yourself where there is none; you don't create suffering for yourself by not creating a self for yourself where there is none.

If you understand that there is no self, to you or to anything and anybody else, individually and collectively, anywhere and at any time, then your suffering is over. But if you can't understand it right away, you have to work at letting go of something that doesn't exist, namely your self.

The direct path is just to see that there is no self and your suffering is over. But if you can't engage in it, you so to speak have to go by the roundabout one, which is to freeze yourself into a ball of seizure, then let it drop by itself when it is "seized" enough. And you freeze yourself into a ball of seizure by concentrating yourself on a stupid, non-solvable problem that is created for just that purpose — like a public case (gōng-àn) or a speech-head (huà-tóu).

You gather all your strength and roll yourself into a ball of stuckness, so that you become totally stuck, without possibility of escape, and, in that wholesale stuckness, suddenly realise that you yourself do yourself in, and that is the instant of release from the stuckness that you have artificially induced in yourself.

In the end, by either path, you realise that there is no problem in the first place. You can do it by the direct path, quickly and without trouble, and if you can't, you so to speak have to pine away polishing the mirror until you see that it wasn't there, ever. This polishing is the arrow that you stab yourself with in order to realise that there is no delusion in the first place.

In a sense, Buddhist cultivation — except for the direct route — tends to model itself on the Buddha's life experience, in reduced scale, of stabbing oneself with an imaginary arrow (to induce an artificially induced disease) in order to be able to pull it out (to cure the induced disease). In order to end suffering, one masses suffering on oneself, in closed circuit, and when one realises the folly of it, one stops inflicting suffering on oneself, simpliciter.

One steps out of the circle that one has created for oneself. There is no more to Buddhist wisdom than that.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on August 25, 2003. Author: Tang Huyen (Laughing Buddha, Inc.). Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen was a scholar of Buddhist studies with deep command of Pāli, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan sources. Posting to talk.religion.buddhism and related groups from 2003 to 2008, he was among the most rigorous analytical voices in the English-language Buddhist Usenet world. This post arose from a debate about whether the Buddha's suffering was self-inflicted, but expands into a sustained argument about the structural logic of Buddhist cultivation — especially Chan koan practice — as a deliberate and paradoxical form of self-inflicted suffering designed to cure the practitioner's habit of self-infliction.

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

🌲