by Tang Huyen

One then acts as a single piece, though there is no one there to act.

Anaxagoras, if memory serves, says that God acts as a whole,
feels as a whole, moves as a whole. The idea is that somebody
perfect like God is whole and not fragmented, and feels as a
whole, acts as a whole, moves as a whole — not in bits and
pieces. Such a person is unitary, and his motivation and action
are unitary, not fragmented, not disjoint, not contrary.

Dōgen talks about "total action", and again the idea is the same.
One moves as a unit, not as loose fragments moving in different
directions, working at cross-purposes. One perceives at one go,
one acts at one go. The long and arduous Chan training, just as
the long and arduous Buddhist training in general, aims at
harnessing all the resources of the cultivator and gathering
them together, streamlining them, harmonising them, and so
long as there is a self there, it messes the show and doesn't
allow for peace and harmony. When the self has been abdicated,
then paradoxically all resources can be unified and made as one.
One then acts as a single piece, though there is no one there to
act. This is non-acting, non-doing, non-willing, non-mentating.
Total innocence, then.

Another way of looking at it is this. Normal growth takes us
somewhere, and Buddhism takes us from there, brings us to full
growth, and then tops that off with helping us unload the self,
drop all patterns and structures that accumulate from genetic
and social conditioning, and simplify ourselves by working out
and retaining just a few patterns that do not cause suffering.

So the awakeneds are fully grown adults who in addition bring
their growth to completion and drop their self. There are two
elements here: the awakeneds are fully grown adults, and they
bring their growth to completion and drop their self. Full growth
is a sine qua non of awakening. Contrariwise, babyishness
instantly gives away its owner as unawakened.

If anybody behaves in a babyish manner — by blowing up on
mere words on the screen, being jumpy, edgy, frantic, impulsive,
impetuous, losing balance and perspective and getting carried
away by little details, throwing temper tantrums whenever he or
she gets challenged, especially regarding his or her claimed
attainments, being arrogant, presumptuous, full of himself or
herself — you can safely eliminate him or her from the ranks of
the awakeneds.

And this applies well to the Abhidharma and the Great Vehiclistic
speculation: it is a trick of the mind to make something detrimental
appear as useful and in the process shore up its own existence.

Tang Huyen

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on May 9, 2005, in reply to "pr" on the thread "Buddhism is not about balancing but enlightenment." Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen begins by endorsing "pr"'s claim that the aim of practice is to dispose of unconscious conditioning without replacing one form with another — all method-as-method fails. He then develops the positive account: Anaxagoras's divine wholeness and Dōgen's total action converge on the same description. The self is precisely what fragments experience and produces cross-purposes in motivation and deed; its abdication is what makes integration possible. The paradox (unity requires the absence of anyone to be unified) is stated plainly. The babyishness criterion is the eliminative test for claimed awakening: not a character judgment but a logical inference — full growth is a necessary condition, therefore its absence is conclusive. The final note on the Abhidharma and Mahāyāna scholasticism — "a trick of the mind to make something detrimental appear useful to shore up its own existence" — is the sharpest summary of Tang Huyen's consistent anti-scholastic position.

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

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