by Tang Huyen

"Surrender presupposes control, in which one is in full control of oneself, and from that position of strength, one can afford to let it all go."

Act from strength, not from weakness, from abundance, not from indigence, from generosity and magnanimity, not from niggardliness and parsimony, from transparence, not from opacity, from airiness and fluffiness, not from hardness and rigidity, from humour, irony, and levity, not from anger, bitterness and agitation, from absence of place, not from any place.

This last pair can be enigmatic, what it means is that you do not take any place, stand on any platform, stop at any position, but float free, and thus nobody can locate you. The spotted whale gets the harpoon, and if you cannot be placed, situated, pinned down, nobody can attack you, or at most if anybody attacks you, he or she attacks air and his or her attack will blow back to harm him or her, in closed circle. In such absence of place, you serve as mere mirror, and what people say about you is pure projection, without anything to back it up from your side.

Going back to the Buddha, he teaches the absence of thought, the absence of volition, the absence of doing (a-manyamana, an-abhi-samcetana, an-abhi-samskara), not because he is bad at thought, volition, doing, and rejects them to minimise to himself his poor handling of them, but because he is good at them and finds them to be wanting. He lives the home life, with wife and kid, and leaves it, because he finds it wanting. He spends six years in extreme penance, and leaves it, because he finds it wanting. Thus when he rejects self-indulgence as well as self-torture, he speaks from experience, and furthermore he speaks from abundance, not from indigence, as he knows that they lack, and he offers something that exceeds them in return — namely Nirvāṇa, which is the absence of thought, the absence of volition, the absence of doing.

Going back to the discussion at hand, when one has been able to control oneself so as to pull oneself into a single piece, then one can surrender, in one fell swoop (which is the trick in public case meditation). If one is scattered and broken up, one cannot pull oneself together, therefore one can surrender even less. When one is already on top of things, one can then let them go, but if one is bounced around by them, one is at their mercy and is not in any position to let go of them. One can well approach one extreme by the other extreme — one can well approach effortlessness by way of effortfulness (which is the trick in public case meditation), though it is true also that one can approach one extreme directly — one can approach effortlessness by way of effortlessness, as in gentle, effortless silent contemplation, where one directly effaces oneself in favour of the world, and lets the world act in one's stead. But again, this ability to efface oneself to let the world act presupposes that one can pull oneself together into a single piece so that one can then afford to get over oneself, leave oneself empty and let the world take over, the way an empty chair can be occupied.

In brief, surrender presupposes control, in which one is in full control of oneself, and from that position of strength, one can afford to let it all go and surrender. The emphasis (the leverage) is on the "all", because if one can pull oneself together, one can swing it and let it all go, but if one is scattered and broken up, one is in disunity and disunion, and can scarcely afford to let it go. Of course one can train gradually by letting go of one thing at a time, but such a course helps one pull oneself together behind the scenes, so that at length one can then gather oneself up into a ball and let it slide off by its own weight. Externalities, such as public cases or sitting only, scarcely matter and are there mostly to protect the innocent. Behind the scenes the cultivator pulls himself together into a ball so that he can drop himself, and that part is invariant. He grabs control of himself so that he can drop it all and surrender. That is the dialectics of mental culture. Somewhat sinewy and anfractuous, but reality is supposed to be so.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 10 July 2008, in the "controlling interests" thread. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

A precise formulation of TH's dialectical model of cultivation: the "absence of place" principle (you cannot be located, therefore cannot be attacked) belongs to the same family as the effortlessness/effortfulness paradox, the koan method, and the empty chair metaphor — all of which are expressions of the same underlying dynamic. The list "act from strength... from abundance... from absence of place" is the most compressed rendering of TH's ethic of cultivation outside of the late August material. Read alongside "Jumping Through Hoops" (June 2006) and "The Change" (July 2008).

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

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