by Tang Huyen

"If Nirvāṇa comes, fine. If Samsara comes, fine. If God comes, fine. If the Devil comes, fine — they are dealt with without distinction. The rest is fungible."

There are basic options, decisions that pull a whole cortege of consequences after them. Once one is made, it fosters a slew of subsidiary decisions in its wake and blocks other options as impossible.

These high-level, high-impact decisions can be made unconsciously, by one's environment or one's physiological makeup, and can remain unconscious thereafter, for the rest of one's life. If they have been unconscious, Buddhist training, especially mindfulness, dredges them up and makes them conscious, and if they have already been conscious, Buddhist training makes them even more conscious.

Such primitive decisions are like: are words and their meaning instituted once and forever, by some agency like God, in dead finality and fixity, so that we merely use them but may not mess with them (like redefining them to the way we like, or dropping them altogether and going without them, at least for some of the time)? Or are they conventional and relative, so that we can change them in whatever way we like, so long as we still make ourselves understood, and that we can even step out of them altogether, at least some of the time?

The former view is essentialist, and entails that words and their meanings are fixed forever, immutable, and that some special words and their meaning are wholly beyond messing around — for example "God" and "the soul." The word "God" has a referent (not that it has no referent, which would be atheism), not many referents (which would be polytheism), and only one referent, namely the Bookist God. That word is exclusively reserved for him, and nothing and nobody else may lay claim to it, and nobody may use it with reference to anything or anybody else. It is a perfect box, in that it has one referent (not none, not many), and it and its referent are in one-to-one mapping with each other. There is no ambiguity or flexibility possible, no fuzziness, no margin of error. You may not fudge or play with it. It is as clean-cut as anything imaginable.

The latter view is conventionalist and relativist, in that words and their meaning are up to us, and do not exist in and of themselves, from their own side. We may mess with them any way we see fit, so long as we still make ourselves understood. They can never be pinned down to perfect precision, but always are tinged with indelible ambiguity and uncertainty, not just at the margin, but right in their core, which can never be arrived at, can never be got at. In addition the whole realm of words and their meaning is dispensable, in that we can go out of it and leave it alone, at least some of the time, and its absence can be desirable and even salutary.

Another pair of options is: whether something exists out there that makes things and events (including us) true, or our inner attitude that makes everything true. The former is objectivist, the latter subjectivist.

According to the objectivist view, there is something that exists on its own side, independently from us, and if we perceive it or intuit it, it makes things and events (including us) true — things and events are true to the extent that they partake of truth from it. This external something can be personal, like the Christian God, or impersonal, like the Platonic Form Truth. It owns truth from its own side, exclusively, and lends truth to what is outside of it. Physicalism is one version of this view, as in it, things (including us) are true by being physical, and we perceive them as true by perceiving them in their physicality.

The subjectivist view takes truth as an inner attitude of us, and if we are true, we make everything true, from our side. The true seeing makes everything true. Our own openness and transparence make everything come to their truth and shine forth in truth, whatever they were before and from wherever they were before. It does not matter whether they were mind or matter, happy or unhappy, vile or exalted — our being true makes them true.

Another pair of options is to think in terms of things (de re) or in terms of mind (de mente). If things are the last redoubt, we have to go by them, but if mind is the last redoubt, we handle things by handling ourselves. Objectivists of all kinds think about things — this includes theists (who base everything on God, their ultimate reference) and physicalists (who base everything on matter, their ultimate reference). In Buddhism the Abhidharmists (including the Abhidhammists of the Theravāda) fall into this class.

Surprisingly, even in mental culture, one can go by objective (or quasi-objective) factors, like delusions, afflictions, views, fetters and latencies — or one can go by purely subjective factors, like detachment and serenity, in disregard to the content that one deals with. In the latter option, it does not matter what the content of what one experiences is (delusions, afflictions, views, fetters and latencies), what matters is how one deals with it, and if one knows how to deal with it in detachment and equanimity, measure and proportion, balance and perspective, then the actual content that one deals with becomes fungible. If Nirvāṇa comes, fine. If Samsara comes, fine. If God comes, fine. If the Devil comes, fine — they are dealt with without distinction, namely as to whether they are Nirvāṇa or Samsara, God or the Devil.

Notice that when one tries to categorise what one experiences as delusions, afflictions, views, fetters and latencies, one goes by classes (boxes), and there are references to them — one can think to oneself: "this feeling is afflicted because it has certain characteristics, it is an affliction" — but when one deals with everything in detachment and equanimity, measure and proportion, balance and perspective, then one merely balances oneself with regard to the experience, so as not to get caught up in it and carried away by it, the way falling cats adjust themselves in mid-air. The focus is quite different. It all depends on one's attitude. The rest is fungible.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 1 July 2008, in the "Perfect box (was Re: Loki Was: Re: bye bye frogs.)" thread. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The title image — the word "God" as a "perfect box," one referent in one-to-one mapping with one word, no ambiguity permitted — distills the essentialist view with mathematical precision. Tang Huyen builds this post as a philosophical map: three binary pairs (essentialist/conventionalist, objectivist/subjectivist, de re/de mente) each describe the same underlying choice, and each has Buddhist implications. The Buddhist resolution is the move to the second option in each pair: conventional language, subjective truth, and dealing with things through mind rather than as things-in-themselves. The key payoff is the fungibility claim: when one operates in detachment and equanimity, the content of what arises — whether Nirvāṇa or Samsara, God or the Devil — becomes irrelevant. The falling cat analogy (mid-air self-adjustment) recurs in the Tang Huyen corpus as a description of equanimity in motion. Compare "Reverse Faith" (June 2008) and "Making Oneself Small" (June 2008) for the same essentialist/conventionalist theme from different angles.

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

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