by Tang Huyen

When you quiesce your thought, the whole world flows, vibrantly, irresistibly, in harmony and accord.

I have always liked Stoicism in general and the
Stoic worldview in particular. The latter is the
direct contrary to the Gnostic one, in that
Gnosticism condemns the world as the botched
work of a false god whilst Stoicism takes the
world to be perfect, fair, harmonious, coherent,
right, just, and a matchless masterpiece from
God. Gnosticism has its own true God, too,
who rules in a different realm, the realm of
fullness (plērōma) whilst our realm is the realm
of lack (kenōma), and in salvation we leave
our realm behind and ascend to fullness.
Stoicism is more parsimonious, because to it
there is only one realm, ours, and it is already
perfect, if we know how to look, so we don't
need to go anywhere else. If you open
yourself to God, you simultaneously open
yourself to God's grace, in that you see the
world the way God sees the world when he
creates it, namely coherent, harmonious, just,
right, beautiful, perfect, and whatever. You
partake of God's intuition of the world. Of
course God doesn't need to be anything other
than that feeling. But it is a feeling that redeems
instantaneously oneself and the world, in toto.
It is a feeling that is compleat in itself and
refers to nothing outside of itself. It is
self-evident and self-validating and doesn't
need anything else to validate it.

Normal life is somewhere between the Gnostic
condemnation of the world and the Stoic
exaltation of the world, but if you had a choice,
which one would you choose?

The weird thing is that whilst the Stoic feeling
is expressed in thought and language (which is
the only way it can be communicated,
especially when face-to-face meeting cannot
be arranged, like from the ancient Stoics to
us), the feeling itself is not a thought or concept
but a feeling, a sensation. One directly,
immediately feels that the world has redeemed
itself, in the flesh and blood. The Stoic
philosophy merely seeks to express and
communicate that intuition, but you have to have
the intuition to understand it, otherwise it looks
like gibberish. When you have the intuition, it is
direct and immediate, not a thought, not a
concept, not an interpretation, just like when
you hear some music that you like, you feel the
harmony and the flowingness. When you quiesce
your thought, the whole world flows, vibrantly,
irresistibly, in harmony and accord. It is right, so
right that it doesn't need to change to become
any righter. It all happens as if your vision
snapped into God's vision, and you saw the
world from God's perspective.

It is like in Pure Land it is said that when you
take rebirth in Pure Land (Sanskrit Happy
Land) every sight is a sight of the Law (Dharma),
every sound is a sound of Dharma, so you're
surrounded, suffused and saturated with
Dharma, through and through. It may well be the
same feeling but expressed with Buddhist
terminology, for consumption by Buddhists. Or
like the common Buddhist saying that when one
is a Buddha, all is Buddha. Everything is true,
everything is right.

Now this is contrary to the common idea, that in
Buddhism everything is false, everything is empty.
But the idea that everything is false, everything is
empty is only a means to an end, and the end is
to see everything as true, everything as full.
Otherwise what would the ending of suffering be
good for? The ending of suffering is not just the
ending of suffering, but the Buddha also calls it
"happiness" or some such. Yet to see everything
as true, everything as full is not a thought, a
concept, an interpretation, but a feeling, a
sensation, which manifests itself when thought has
been quiesced and laid to rest. It is what remains
when thought has been brought to a stop and
held in abeyance.

Thought has habituated us to it, insidiously, so
much so that we take the world as interpreted and
overlaid by it to be the norm. But it is not the
norm, surely not to the state without thought.
When we abstain from thought, the very same
world becomes different and full of charm, all on
its own side, unasked. Unbeknownst to us
thought has held the world captive, and when the
world is freed from thought, the very same world
from the Kingdom of Nature becomes Kingdom
of Grace. The only ticket there is that we calm our
thought and quiesce it to the full, or to whatever
extent accessible to us. Even a partial and episodic
glimpse is worth it, to put everything in perspective.

Shiro Matsumoto, "Critiques of Tathāgatagarbha
Thought and Critical Buddhism", Journal of Buddhist
Studies, Faculty of Buddhism, Komazawa University,
No. 33, Oct 2002, 378–360, here 364–363 mentions
two Tathāgatagarbha theories, "Buddha-nature
Immanence theory" and "Buddha-nature Manifestation
theory", then says: "The former corresponds to Indian
Tathāgatagarbha theory, itself Buddhist version of the
'ātman' theory of Hinduism, according to which
Buddha-nature ... is considered to dwell within the
bodies of sentient beings." "The second theory, i.e.,
'Buddha-nature Manifestation theory' is Chinese
development of Indian Tathāgatagarbha thought,
according to which Buddha-nature is already manifested
as all phenomenal existences, including non-sentient
beings such as trees and stones. In other words,
phenomenal things, as such, are regarded as
Buddha-nature itself, and are, as it were, totally
absolutized."

He then proceeds to quote from Chinese Chan masters
and Japanese Zen masters.

Hui-chung: "Non-sentient things such as walls and tiles
are all the mind of the old Buddha."

Dōgen: "Everything is Buddha-nature."

The ultimate is what appears (let us remember that to
phainomenon in Greek means what appears). We don't
need to go anywhere else, as it is already fully manifest
in our sensation.

In another article, "Critical Considerations of Zen
Thought", Annual Report of the Zen Institute,
Komazawa University, No. 10, Mar 1999, 238–217,
the same author presents the same dichotomy in
almost the same words, and adds a very telling
point: "It is to be noted that Buddha-nature Immanence
theory is obliged to have the dualistic structure, like the
general idea of the 'ātman' theory ... On the contrary,
Buddha-nature Manifestation theory has the structure
of extreme monism, where all distinctions, including
that between body and soul, are not admitted. Because
phenomenal existences or things are, as such,
absolutized by the theory, it seems clear that the theory
is an ultimate form or an extremity of the theory of
'affirming the realities'."

He then quotes Hsüan-sha: "Mountain is mountain.
River is river. There is no place, in the whole world of
ten quarters, that is not true." And he comments:
"Here every phenomenal existence, especially
insentient being, is affirmed as absolute."

He further quotes Dōgen, this time against the
Manifestation theory: "Some people say that to see
mountains and rivers is to see Tathāgatas. They do not
know the way of Buddhas and Patriarchs."

Matsumoto's interpretative English words are somewhat
extreme, like "absolutized" and "absolute", but he does
present the right idea, namely that for some Chan masters,
what is manifest to us in our phenomenal life, however
humble, is already as real and ultimate as we're ever to
get, from mountains and rivers right down to walls and
tiles.

This Buddha-Nature Manifestation theory is another
version of the same Stoic intuition. "Non-sentient things
such as walls and tiles are all the mind of the old
Buddha." "There is no place, in the whole world of ten
quarters, that is not true."

Tang Huyen

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on July 5, 2005, in reply to Lee Dillion, who had noticed and remarked on Tang Huyen's increasingly "playful" phrasing. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The occasion — Lee Dillion's compliment on Tang Huyen's lightened touch — opens into one of Tang Huyen's most architecturally ambitious posts. The Gnostic-Stoic opposition serves as the organizing axis: two complete cosmologies, one condemning the world as fallen, one exalting it as already perfect. Tang Huyen places Buddhist non-mentation on the Stoic side: when thought is quiesced, the world reveals itself as it already is — perfect, harmonious, true. The Pure Land reading of this experience (every sight a sight of Dharma) and the Tathāgatagarbha / Buddha-nature Manifestation theory (Hui-chung, Dōgen, Hsüan-sha) are presented as independent re-discoveries of the same Stoic intuition. Matsumoto's scholarly distinction between immanence theory (ātman-type, dualistic) and manifestation theory (monistic, world-affirming) gives the Buddhist side of the argument a precise scholarly grounding. The closing phrase — "The Kingdom of Nature becomes Kingdom of Grace" — is Tang Huyen's most evocative formulation of the meditative transformation.

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

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