A Nefarious Plot — On Self-Sabotage, Self-Hatred, and the Vicious Circle of Bondage — Tang Huyen meditates on a phenomenon he finds deeply puzzling: people who speak voluminously about liberation, know all the techniques of mental culture, and yet remain entirely trapped — driven by anger, bitterness, and extreme self-hatred. His diagnosis: self-hatred is self-reinforcing. It both perpetuates itself and prevents its own removal, cowing its owner into submission ahead of time. The accumulated knowledge of liberation becomes useless not from ignorance but from a prior defeat. It is all fated, he concludes — there is no freedom in there.
A Storyless Reception — On Narrative, Self-Image, and Freedom from Self — Tang Huyen challenges the interpretivist claim that we cannot know without stories, arguing that we can simply cognise in the raw without thought or narrative — knowing sensibly rather than intellectively. He then applies this to the psychology of self: mental culture moves from distorted self-narrative toward honest self-perception, and finally to the dropping of all self-narrative, leaving no self to defend.
Affirming the Realities — On Emptiness, Tathagatagarbha Manifestation, and the World That Shows Itself — Tang Huyen argues that Buddhist emptiness does not negate the world but liberates it to show itself in full glory. Drawing on Shiro Matsumoto's distinction between Buddha-nature Immanence theory and Buddha-nature Manifestation theory, and quoting Hui-chung, Dōgen, and Hsuean-sha, he shows that the phenomenal world — to phainomenon, that which appears — is already ultimate: it shows, rather than points. The only obstruction to the world's self-manifestation is our mentation.
All You Ever Need — On Fluff, the Worldview of Buddhism, and the Superfluity of Technique — Tang Huyen's most concentrated statement of Buddhist practice: all you ever need is to treat everything as fluff. Jen's words from the newsgroup serve as the most concise summary of the philosophical worldview of Buddhism — a play of ideas, nothing to take seriously, never-ending if you try to box it in with concepts. Industrial-strength technique is secondary; most practitioners who pursue it have not yet attained to this basic view. Technique is fluff too.
Ambiguity — On the Raft, Open Mentation, and the Scientistic Straightjacket — Tang Huyen takes a question about Right Speech as an occasion for a philosophical account of how Buddhist cultivation progressively opens one to ambiguity. The Buddha's teaching is a raft, not an absolute. In Nirvāṇa the mentational apparatus is quiesced; upon reactivation it is flexible, light, transparent. A scientistic worldview — physicalism — is a fool's voluntary prison, clamping a single mental category onto the incommensurable richness of what happens. Awakening increases tolerance for ambiguity.
Attachment is the Biggest Problem on Earth — Lama Yeshe — A complete teaching by Lama Yeshe on attachment as the root of all suffering, shared on talk.religion.buddhism in 2004 by Evelyn Ruut from an issue of Mandala Magazine. Covers the evolution of ego into attachment, the kindness of other beings, the wheel of life, and the path of wisdom and method.
Awakening Is No Panacea — On Human Limits, the Dhammapada, and the Unguided Saint — Tang Huyen argues that awakening does not surpass the limits of a human mind. Wisdom leaves behind all norms, standards, and guidelines — which means the awakened person, like the deluded person, strikes in the dark. Awakening includes acceptance of one's limits. The Dhammapada's brahman has transcended merit and demerit alike — and has nothing positive to guide him. Awakening is no panacea: it only ends suffering for oneself. Everything else is frivolous and gratuitous.
Bad Faith — On the Warrior's Training, Self-Inversion, and the Crash — Tang Huyen on the practitioner who trains for the challenge — and on the opposite: the person who cannot stand themselves, who inverts every incoming signal to protect their self-image, who spends decades building the wall that will one day destroy them. When the crash comes, they are goners. Mother Nature will not be fooled. A clinical sequel to the earlier corpus gem 'Self-Deception as Obstacle' — extending it to its endgame.
Balance and Perspective — On the Transparent Mind, the Epictetus Test, and the Parable of the Saw — Tang Huyen describes the transparent mind of awakening: details are not blocked out but differently situated, so that shit can be grace, and Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa are treated the same way. Salvation is in a breeze — an attitude that comes free. The Epictetus story (whose leg was broken but whose salvation was uninterrupted) and the Parable of the Saw (MN I.129) illustrate the same point: freedom is purely subjective and strictly sentimental, tied to nothing real out there.
Bitsy Coherence — On the Four Reliances, the Buddha's Two Sides, and Doing Buddhism in Person — Tang Huyen elaborates three interconnected themes: the four reliances (rely on the Dharma, not the person), the Buddha's two distinct personalities in the early canon (sober-straightforward and Thespian-dramatic), and what it means to actually do Buddhism in daily life. The post culminates in the Chinese Chan phrase 'adapt to circumstances but remain unchanged, remain unchanged but adapt to circumstances' — the description of a Dharma vessel living among ordinary obligations.
Blocking God by Hubris — On Mother Teresa, Eckhart, Fénelon, and the Self That Stands in the Way — Tang Huyen reads Mother Teresa's lifelong spiritual desolation as a case study in comparative salvation: her Church taught her to petition Christ with ever-greater intensity, while the mystical tradition condemned by that same Church — Eckhart, Fénelon, Eastern Orthodoxy — taught that the self itself blocks God from coming, and that emptying the self is the only true opening. The post ends with the irony that expectation of any kind, even of God, is hubris.
Body in the Body — A Mindless View of the Satipatthana Sutta — NotImportant argues that the vipassana tradition's emphasis on 'noting' and labelling misreads the Satipatthana Sutta — that true insight requires knowing the body as it is, without any mental elaboration.
Building Down — On Mindfulness, the Breath, and the Non-Doing of Awakening — Tang Huyen distinguishes between two modes of Buddhist practice: building up (exercises of the imagination, such as the contemplation of the unclean or the Four Divine Abodes) and building down (mindfulness). Mindfulness is the one-size-fits-all approach, the path all the way to awakening. The Buddha's own awakening was a building down — ceasing the massive imposition of six years of penance, and simply being mindful.
Calming and Insight-Penetration — On the Full Taxonomy of Buddhist Meditation and the Pathless Serenity — Tang Huyen corrects a reduction of Buddhist meditation to bare-attention mindfulness, offering the full taxonomy: calming (samatha) includes the four form meditations, the four formless attainments, and the four Divine Abodes; insight-penetration covers mindfulness, the three-marks contemplation, and Chan practice — and the cessation attainment combines both to bestow arhat-ship. But the quickest path has no technique at all.
Canning a Surprise — On the Contradiction and Inanity at the Heart of Buddhism — Tang Huyen argues that Buddhism is essentially the attempt to package and sell a total surprise — the accidental discovery that non-doing ends suffering. Nirvāṇa as an-abhi-saṃskāra equals the Daoist wu-wei. The contradiction is essential, not accidental: doing the non-doing is a flat logical impossibility that can only be resolved in practice.
Category Error — On the Inner and the Outer, Choicelessness, and the Door to Grace — Tang Huyen draws the fundamental distinction between the outer, objective world — which allows precise, technical handling — and the inner, subjective world, which resists artifice and imposition. The Buddha and Laozi agree: in the inner world, it is best not to interfere. The category error of applying outer-world methods (including physicalism) to the inner world is not merely wrong but counterproductive. Choicelessness may be the quickest path to transcendence.
Centre of Awareness — On Mindfulness, the Canonical Standard, and the Freedom Beyond Method — Tang Huyen on the canonical definition of mindfulness from MN I.56, with the Schmithausen Sanskrit parallel — and then a phenomenological account from personal experience: mindfulness as the presence established in front of oneself, where there is no longer 'me' but just the presence. Closes with a sharp refusal to restrict meditation to any single mode: to limit it would be slavery, not freedom.
Chunking and Bagging — On the Duality and Non-Duality of Subject and Object — Tang Huyen's clearest technical account of what non-duality of subject and object actually means: not that subject and object are identical, but that thought is inactive and does not cut the wholesome sense-field into bits and pieces (chunking) to be labelled and collected (bagging). In non-duality, consciousness is fully active — there is awareness of what happens — but no cutting, no chunking, no bagging. The sense-field is left intact.
Come and See — On A Priori Traps and Buddhist Verification — Tang Huyen argues that our conceptual frameworks — baskets, cages, structures — become the very traps that ensnare us, and that the Buddha's teaching is ehi-passika, 'come and see': engage directly, verify for yourself, trust grows dialectically from results.
Comfort Zone — On Addiction, Virtuous Circles, and Fluffy Beliefs — Tang Huyen examines how spiritual problems, when too pressing, become invisible — like the addict who cannot step back to see the addiction. The breakthrough is not force but the creation of a comfort zone, which starts a virtuous circle: as the problem recedes, clarity grows; as clarity grows, the problem recedes further. At the extreme, the problem is not merely solved but seen as never having been a problem — which is exactly what happened to the Buddha that night.
Crashes — On Midlife Disintegration, Energy Hierarchies, and the Mechanics of the Herd — Tang Huyen examines the midlife crash as a Usenet phenomenon — a psychological disintegration visible in slow motion through public posting. Crashes proceed in the opposite direction from Buddhist cultivation: instead of integration and wholeness, they produce fragmentation, dissociation, and the seizure of external identity through a herd-leader and an enemy. Hierarchy within the herd is determined by energy levels, and when a leader crashes and loses energy, the hierarchy inverts — and the former followers turn on the former leader with unlimited rage.
Deed Without Doer — On the Scripture on Ultimate Emptiness and the Buddhist Dissolution of Agency — A single canonical citation from the Scripture on Ultimate Emptiness (Paramartha-sunyata-sutra): there is deed, there is the return of deed, but there cannot be obtained the doer — except as a linguistic convention on things (dharma-samketa). Tang Huyen shows how each 'this' and 'that' in dependent origination is a conventional carving, arbitrary, nothing absolute or ultimate.
Dropping Free — On the Five Aggregates, Liberation, and Reconciliation with the World — Tang Huyen on what Buddhist liberation actually means: not escape into an unconditioned realm, not a metaphysical dream, but reconciliation with oneself and one's world so complete that one can afford to let go and simply live. The freed person stops imposing conceptual boundaries on experience and allows the flowing whole to remain untouched by mentation.
Effortlessness at the End — On Non-Doing, D.T. Suzuki, and the Chan Tradition — Tang Huyen argues that effortlessness — wu-wei, an-abhisaṃskāra — is not optional in Buddhism but is the universal end of all paths. Whether one begins with effort or without it, the destination is non-doing. He corrects D. T. Suzuki's famous claim that Zen has nothing to do with quietistic rest, noting that the entire Chan tradition of China is soaked in Daoist non-doing. Effort, where used, is only ever a means toward its own abandonment.
Einstein on Religion and Science — A Compilation — Evelyn Ruut's 2006 compilation of Einstein's writings on cosmic religious feeling, the relation of science and religion, and the nature of the mystical — with a Krishnamurti passage on education and freedom of mind.
Energy and the Herd — On Charisma, Spiritual Seeking, and the Dissolution of Mental Structure — Tang Huyen on the role of energy in spiritual communities: for many seekers, the electric charge of charismatic transmission is the real goal, with doctrine purely adventitious. The herd instinct operates on energy and hierarchy; high-energy leaders attract followers not through the content of their teaching but through the energetic field itself. Conflict, though it feels like power, depletes the structure that sustains it.
Error and Waking Up from It — On the Buddha's Asceticism, Excess, and the Reconciliation Before Awakening — Tang Huyen reads the Buddha's six-year Jaina period as a case study in error and awakening from error. The extreme self-mortification was revolt in pure form — and it is precisely its extremity that accelerates the awakening from it. Citing Blake's 'road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,' he argues that a phase of peace with oneself and reconciliation with oneself is a necessary precondition for mental culture to bear fruit, however brief.
Extenuating Circumstances — On the Bodhisattva Who Kills and Skill in Means — Tang Huyen presents Buddhist canonical and academic sources on the most difficult question in Buddhist ethics: under what circumstances may a Bodhisattva kill? Drawing on Tola and Dragonetti's survey of Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan sutras, Tang Huyen traces the upāya-kausalya reasoning — the Bodhisattva who kills a robber to prevent greater harm, willingly accepting the karmic consequence, accumulates merit rather than offense.
Fallen Among Things — On Karma, No-Self, and the Danger of Chunking and Bagging — Tang Huyen resolves the apparent contradiction between Buddhist karma theory and the no-self teaching, arguing that deed and its return require no substance-self — only impersonal processes regulated by legality, not causality. Draws on SA 335, the Diamond Sutra, and Chrysippus.
Falsity to Truth — On Buddhist Methods, Counter-Factual Belief, and the Path Through Artifice — Tang Huyen distinguishes Buddhist method from Buddhist truth: a dharma's effectiveness has nothing to do with its factual content. From the contemplation of the unclean to the great totalisations, Buddhism uses fiction to point beyond fiction — and that pointing does not make the fiction real.
Firm as a Crag — On Sona's Awakening, the Rise and Setting of Sense, and Nirvāṇa as Perspective — Tang Huyen glosses Sona Kolivisa's awakening poem to establish the key distinction: the awakeneds observe the rise and setting of sense without adding liking or disliking. Nirvāṇa and Samsāra are not different realities but different perspectives on the same world, distinguished by the absence or presence of attachment — and therefore both are impermanent.
Float Above — On Buddhism as the Softening of Positions and Perspectives — Tang Huyen distills Buddhist practice to a single movement: the softening of concepts and categories, the taking of them ironically. Positions and perspectives are slippery, imprecise, relational — good servants and bad masters, like money. Buddhism teaches one to ride divergent positions without attaching to any, to take them suggestively not definitively. The closing word: float with them if you need them, float above them all if you don't.
Floating — On the Incommensurable Richness of the Sensible World — Tang Huyen shares his 1999 reply to a reader's letter about Blake, Dylan Thomas, and the 'incommensurable richness of the sensible world' — asking whether beauty requires desire. Tang Huyen responds: Early Chan poetry is the testimony, weightless and unweighted by passion; Marcus Aurelius, Damascius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Nicholas of Cusa are called as witnesses. He confesses he is a spaceshot who knows none of it firsthand.
Fluff and Play — On Buddhist Disport, the Lion's Play, and the Martyr Complex — Tang Huyen connects Buddhist play (lila, vikridata) to the canonical samadhi literature — the 'Lion's Play' concentration from Conze's Large Sutra, where one can 'play with all the concentrations.' Once one sees through language and knows how to treat it as fluff, one is free to play: for fun and not for keeps, in make-believe and not for real. The second half diagnoses the opposite: those who reify words and impale themselves on them, the self-caused suffering of the martyr complex and its collusion structure.
Freedom Comes Free — On the End of Technique and the Beginning of Grace — Tang Huyen on the paradox of Buddhist technique: it takes technique to get beyond technique, and getting beyond technique is the goal. When chunking and bagging are abandoned even partially, content flows without interpretation and the Kingdom of Nature becomes the Kingdom of Grace — in situ. He adds a diagnostic of those who have never truly practiced: they spiral when destabilised, unable to find their centre. He closes with the core paradox of Daoism and Buddhism: freedom is free; less is more; once you have balance and perspective you need nothing else.
Freedom from the Known — On Krishnamurti, Total Action, and the Work That Cannot Be Sham — Tang Huyen reads Krishnamurti's 'freedom from the known' through a Buddhist lens: liberation comes from facing the known and opening up to the unknown, wholeheartedly, as one single unit in total action. The same underlying process — pulling oneself together to act in unison — is what all methods, effortful and effortless alike, are actually attempting. Nobody else can walk one's talk.
Gelling and Ungelling — On Buddhist Cosmogony, Luminous Beings, and the Uncoarsening of the Mind — Tang Huyen distinguishes the Buddhist path from the Hindu one through the metaphor of cosmological gelling and ungelling. Drawing on A. K. Warder's translation of the Buddhist cosmogony, he shows how beings begin luminous and flexible, coarsen through time and craving, and are restored not by physical reversal but by the purely mental act of uncoarsening — opening up in non-knowledge and non-resistance.
Gone Beyond — On the Ending of Poisons, the Transparent Mind, and the Freedom of the Awakened — Tang Huyen's most compressed portrait of Buddhist awakening: the three poisons ended, mentation transparent and tool-like rather than master, energies harmonised, self dropped. The awakened act from a background of calmness and emptiness — sometimes called no-mind — and their action is total action, yet also non-action, and there is nobody acting it.
Happiness by Roundabout — On the Four Buddhist Joys, Cultivation as By-Product, and the Indirect Path — Tang Huyen identifies the four Buddhist joys — nekkhama-sukha, paviveka-sukha, upasama-sukha, sambodha-sukha — and explains their common structural feature: happiness arrives as a by-product of pursuing something else. The roundabout axiom applies from worldly happiness all the way to the joy of awakening. If you do Buddhist cultivation correctly, happiness is part of the package, unasked.
Happy Accident — On the Buddha's Asceticism, Awakening, and the Contingency of the Dharma — Tang Huyen traces the Buddha's path from six years of totalitarian Jaina self-mortification through the twofold awakening to the accidental beginning of his teaching — arguing that Buddhism was not planned or premeditated but 'happenstantial,' driven by events, and could have been otherwise.
How to Unbind — On False Problems, the Cessation of Notion, and Liberation Without Self — Tang Huyen's longest standalone essay on Buddhist practice: the way to unbind is not to attack the self but to stop mentating and composing. Two canonical texts — the Potthapada Sutta on the gradual cessation of notion and the Scripture on the Analysis of the Six Modalities — demonstrate that liberation is achieved by focusing on processes (notion, the compositions) rather than on the self. The self dissolves stealthily, as a byproduct.
In the Seen Just the Seen — On Choiceless Awareness and Perception Without Assessment — Tang Huyen on what it means to perceive without assessment — what Krishnamurti calls 'choiceless awareness' and the Buddha calls 'in the seen just the seen.' Distinguishes between that unmediated state and the more reachable practice of bracketing oneself out of perception: the more one leaves oneself out, the less room one occupies, and the more room the world has to enter undisturbed.
Introduction to talk.religion.buddhism — A scholarly introduction to talk.religion.buddhism, the Usenet newsgroup where practitioners and scholars of the Buddhist world gathered for two decades of comparative doctrinal debate, cross-traditional analysis, and first-person accounts of practice.
Is Is — On Augustine, the Absolute Being, and the Immutable Pattern — Tang Huyen quotes Augustine on the absolute is-ness of God versus the derived being of creation, noting with characteristic wit that scholastic Latin and streetwise American English trace the same immutable metaphysical pattern.
It's All Dharma — On Manner, Matter, and the Payoff of Buddhist Training — Tang Huyen on Usenet-as-Buddhist-training-ground. In utter chaos, the practitioner who has cultivated mental distance, balance, and perspective knows how to make a Buddha-land of it, dancing on the edge of the flow. Buddhism teaches content — the Four Noble Truths and so on — but the core is the attitude, the manner. That's the payoff: every sound is the sound of Dharma, every sight a sight of Dharma.
Jumping Through Hoops — On States, Intellective Views, and the Core Paradox of Buddhist and Daoist Teaching — Tang Huyen examines the two-level problem at the heart of Buddhist and Daoist teaching: the state of non-mentation cannot be described from within non-mentation, yet the teacher must use thought and language to point at it, thereby contradicting the very thing pointed at. Draws on Sengzhao's Xinxin Ming, negative theology, and the Buddhist theory of the made-up self.
Knowledge and Learning — On the Kingdom of Nature, the Kingdom of Grace, and Lao-Zi's Abandonment — Tang Huyen applies Leibniz's distinction between the Kingdom of Nature and the Kingdom of Grace to the limits of scientific knowledge. Science studies only the measurable portion of the Kingdom of Nature; the Kingdom of Grace is accessible only to subjective experience and fully escapes objective study. The Kingdom of Grace is the default state, the basal state — it comes only when we don't do anything, especially not objective study. Lao-zi's injunction to abandon knowledge and learning is how it is attained.
Let the Prior Limit Be — On Rebirth, Speculation, and the Awakened Life — Tang Huyen responds to a challenge about rebirth with a dense anthology of canonical citations — from the Aṅguttara, Saṃyukta, and Majjhima Nikāyas — showing that the Buddha explicitly instructed practitioners to cut without remainder all views about past and future lives.
Letting Go of Letting Go — On Ecstatic States, the Buddhist Business, and the Homeless Perspective — Tang Huyen clarifies the relationship between Buddhist meditative states and awakening: the four form meditations and formless attainments include deeply pleasurable and ecstatic experiences, but Buddhism is not in those experiences — it is in the letting go of them. Attachment to ecstatic states is dangerous, possibly for life. What wholesale abandonment leaves behind is a non-situated, unlocalised, homeless perspective that floats free with no mooring.
Logic and Its Adversary — On Omniscience, Thought as Weakness, and the Buddhist Means — Tang Huyen argues, via Mach and Heidegger, that thought and logic reflect a weakness of the finite mind, not a glory; an omniscient mind would not need science or logic. The redeeming feature of Buddhist teaching is that it knows itself to be only a means — a raft to be let go.
Logic of Transcendence — On Contrary and Contradictory Negation in Buddhist Liberation — Tang Huyen applies the logical distinction between contrary and contradictory negation to the structure of Buddhist liberation. In a contrary negation, two extremes oppose each other within a single dimension — good versus bad, merit versus demerit — and the negation moves within that dimension. In a contradictory negation, Buddhist liberation exits the dimension entirely: the neither-black-nor-white deed is not just the absence of bad but the abandonment of the entire axis of deed. Liberation is liberation from all dimensions constituted by pairs of extremes.
Loose Talk and Freedom — On the Limits of Language in Teaching Awakening — Tang Huyen sets out three reasons why Buddhist and Daoist teachers cannot talk about awakening without distorting it: the awakened state is outside thought and language, it is purely subjective and strictly sentimental, and it can only be approached obliquely through the conventional world. The detour through impermanence and no-self is a smokescreen that protects the innocent — and suffering, its ending, and Nirvana are all purely subjective matters that the world knows nothing about.
Lotuses from the Mud of Usenet — 2007 — Evelyn Ruut's four-part year-end harvest of 2007's best wisdom from talk.religion.buddhism — teachings, koans, and reflections from the newsgroup's regulars.
Maitreya in the Mahayana Tradition — Selected Readings — Evelyn Ruut surveys the Buddhist figure of Maitreya — the coming Buddha — across Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana traditions: his iconography, his cosmic role, his authorship of the Five Books transmitted through Asanga, and the story of Asanga's twelve-year vigil.
Making Oneself Small — On Stoicism, European Mysticism, and Opening to the Highest — Tang Huyen traces how Stoicism became the hidden architecture of European mystical traditions — through Plotinus, absorbed by Christian theology, influencing Kant and Hegel — and shows that the mystical approach of self-emptying and opening is the reverse of Mother Teresa's error. Buddhism, Stoicism, and Daoism share this explicit teaching of opening to openness itself.
Manner and Matter — On the Dao, the Dharma, and the Structure That Masters Us — Tang Huyen offers a precise account of what the Dao, the Dharma, Nirvana, and God share: they are not what we see but how we see — manner, not matter. The interpretive structure delusion builds serves us first as tool, then overreaches and becomes imperious master. The great liberation traditions are all ways of putting it back in its place. Appended: a 2003 post expanding the theme — the Buddhist path as commitment that teaches one to uncommit, ending in unsupported, unestablished consciousness.
Maya and Papañca — On the Hinduist and Buddhist Interpretations of Illusion — Tang Huyen draws a sharp distinction between Hinduism's de re Maya (the manifold world itself is false; see through it to Brahman) and Buddhism's de intellectu Maya (only our mentation is false; sensation as received is real). The same contrast extends to papañca: in Hinduism it names the proliferation of the world; in Buddhism, only the mental proliferation layered on top of sensation.
Meditation and Its Vagaries — On the Reversal of Means and End in Contemplative Practice — Tang Huyen examines how meditative practice can be turned toward ends opposite to its stated purpose. Concentration developed as a means to liberation can become its own end — enslaving its owner. Visualisation can amplify paranoia. Energy developed in practice can feed the ego rather than dissolve it. The corrective is mindfulness in the canonical sense: knowing who one is and what one does.
Mind-making — On Manasikāra, Non-Composition, and the Daoist Synthesis — Tang Huyen traces the active meaning of manasikāra through the Pali canon, showing through two canonical citations that Nirvāṇa is precisely an-abhisamskāra — the cessation of all composing, willing, and mind-making.
Mindfulness or Mindlessness — On Sati, Non-Mentation, and the Complete Cessation of Notion — Tang Huyen's most comprehensive technical account of Buddhist practice, written as a letter to Bao Pu. Covers the etymology and triple structure of mindfulness (sati/smṛti/nian), the distinction between notion and composition in the five aggregates, chunking and bagging as the mechanics of delusion, wu-nian/wu-wei/an-abhisaṅskāra as exact synonyms for awakening, the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta's graduated cessation of notion, MN 140 on neither composing nor willing, and the Chinese parallel: nian-nian jiě-tuō, liberated from instant to instant because no thought arises. The post was originally written for the Daoist newsgroup and cross-posted to talk.religion.buddhism, reflecting Tang Huyen's conviction that Lao-zi and the Buddha are teaching the same thing.
Negative Cosmology, Negative Theology — On Buddha-Nature and the Unknowable — Tang Huyen draws a parallel between black hole cosmology and negative theology, then argues for the Chan "Manifestation theory" of Buddha-nature: the ultimate is fully present in the phenomenal world, not hidden beyond it.
Newsgroup Gems and Other Quotes — 2002 — Evelyn Ruut's harvest of wisdom from talk.religion.buddhism — quotes and exchanges gathered from the newsgroup and its regulars over the course of 2002.
Newsgroup Gems and Other Quotes — 2005 — Evelyn Ruut's annual harvest of wisdom from talk.religion.buddhism — forty-one quotes and exchanges gathered from the newsgroup and its regulars over the course of 2005.
No Exit — On Manner, Nirvāṇa, and the Kingdom of Grace in Situ — Tang Huyen's response to the Tibetan teacher's advice: drop all hope of liberation. He takes the question seriously. What if there really is no way out? The answer: the manner of treating experience — light, light-hearted, detached, equanimous — is already the transformation. Whether Nirvāṇa or Saṃsāra occurs, one treats it the same way. The Kingdom of Nature becomes the Kingdom of Grace in situ, and for free. No teacher, no method, no fee.
No Place to Stand — On the Four Stations for Consciousness and the Unestablished Mind — Tang Huyen provides his own translation of SN 22.54–55 (the Buddha's four stations for consciousness) to show how liberation arises: when passion for form, feeling, notion, and compositions is done away with, consciousness loses its platform, ceases to grow, ceases to compose, becomes stable, knows it has enough, and blows out. Liberation is purely subjective and perpendicular to the world.
No Regard — On the Unobtainable, the Dropping of Problems, and Life in Letting Go — Tang Huyen traces the Buddha's twofold teaching: the obsessive-compulsive path of controlled mindfulness, and its higher critique — self and what belongs to self are unobtainable, all ground is groundless. Problems are solved not by solving but by dropping; life is lived not by fitting experience into frameworks but by letting it be just the way it is.
No Relation — On Sensation, Thought, and the Critique of Seeing Dependent Origination — Tang Huyen distinguishes the world of sensation from the world of thought: while relations, things, objects, self, and other exist in the world, none of them are delivered by raw sensation. Sensation delivers a continuous, fully differentiated field with no distinctions. This yields a sharp critique of the Tibetan Buddhist claim that the awakened sage sees Dependent Origination — Dependent Origination is thought-up, not sensation-given.
No Standing Wave — On Buddhism, Hinduism, and the Unsupported Thought — Tang Huyen distinguishes Buddhist from Hindu negation at the perceptual level: Hinduism thinks away particulars to arrive at a positive permanent Brahman; Buddhism takes all as transitory, including consciousness itself, and posits no ultimate support. The Diamond Sutra's 'unsupported thought' (a-pratiṣṭhitaṃ cittaṃ) describes the cultivator who perceives fully but does not stop on, stabilize, chunk, or bag perceptual flux. Buddhist negation is gentle, about the mind; Hindu negation is brutal, about the thing.
Non-Mentation — On Mindfulness, Wu-Nian, and the Cessation of Thought — Tang Huyen's 2005 comparative essay explaining the relationship between Buddhist mindfulness (sati) and Chan/Daoist non-mentation (wu-nian/wu-wei), arguing that mindfulness is the vigilance that makes non-mentation possible — with canonical citations from the Pali canon, the Chinese Agamas, and the Dao De Jing.
Non-thought — On Wu-nian, Dōgen, and the Complete Cessation of Mentation — Tang Huyen unpacks Dōgen's three-term distinction (shiryō/fu-shiryō/hi-shiryō, or nian/wu-nian/fei-nian) using Chinese Buddhist terminology and Pāli primary sources, distinguishing the absence of thought (wu nian), the negation of thought (fei nian), and the abstention from thought (bu nian). Culminates in close readings of DN I,184 and MN III,246 to show that liberation is simply not mentating and not composing — nothing mysterious, nothing mystical.
Norm and Normlessness — On the Double Standard of Awakening and the Saint Beyond Reference — Tang Huyen answers a question about Expedient Means and whether the awakened can deceive by going to the canonical root: the Buddhist saint has transcended all norms and standards, merit and demerit alike. Drawing on the Dhammapada, the Sutta-nipata, the Anguttara Nikaya, and the Majjhima Nikaya, he shows that the freed do not lean on anything, coagulate nothing into bits, and therefore cannot be seen or judged by others — because to judge them is to impose a reference they have already relinquished.
Not Business as Usual — On the Quiescing of Thought and the World's Redemption — Tang Huyen's most sustained canonical account of what happens when thought is fully quiesced: not emptiness, but the world coming alive with coherence, harmony, rightness, beauty. Drawing on the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta's graduated cessation of notion and the Scripture on the Analysis of the Six Modalities, Tang Huyen argues that Nirvāṇa is not calm detachment from the world but the world's own redemption — what Chinese Buddhism calls miao-you, wonderful existence. Mother Nature's trick: grace comes when one does nothing to deserve it.
Not Made by Me — On Dependent Arisal, Emptiness, and the Practical Scope of Buddhism — Tang Huyen's systematic response to the question of whether Buddhism posits essences or voids: it posits neither as metaphysical doctrine, but uses both as pragmatic means. The Dependent Arisal was not made by the Buddha or anyone else — it stands as a discovered law, not a constructed theory. Emptiness is an attempt to correct an error, not a truth in its own right. And if a tree falls in a forest with no one around to hear it — that question is outside the purview of Buddhism.
Nothing Is Salvation — On Paul Williams, Kant, and the Contract of Nature — Tang Huyen responds to Paul Williams' argument that Buddhism cannot answer 'why is there something rather than nothing' by tracing the Buddha's twofold awakening — from Jaina self-mortification to the complete calming of the compositions — and arguing that the question of contingency is one Buddhism bypasses entirely, not fails. The post builds through Stoicism, Christian negative theology, and two Kantian Latin phrases to its conclusion: non-doing is the Contract of Nature, and nothing is salvation.
Nothing of Value — On Western Philosophy, Stoicism, and the Dharma That Belongs to No One — In reply to the claim that there is 'nothing of value in Western philosophy,' Tang Huyen invokes the Buddha's own metaphor — the abandoned road to an old town that anyone can find independently — then assembles Hegel, Augustine, and Johannes Scotus Eriugena to show that German idealism and Christian mysticism contain genuine Buddhist insight. The Dharma is not Buddhism's proprietary discovery; it is the nature of things, available to all who look without prejudice.
Nothing to Defend — On the Marks of Awakening and the Tests of the Settled Mind — Tang Huyen's practical guide to identifying an awakened person: from the scriptural criterion (an empty mind leaves no trace when read) to external behavioral tests — tolerance for criticism, flexibility across perspectives, balance of mood, and above all, nothing to defend or protect. The goal is elimination of the unworthy rather than positive identification; what remains is the settled, self-reconciled person who displays grace and magnanimity.
On Anger and Its Antidote — A Practitioner's Account — Evelyn Ruut responds to a question about Buddhist anger practice by sharing her own experience: how her teacher instructed her to dedicate all her practice to the person she most resented, and how that practice transformed her relationship with her father.
On Death and Parting — A Gathering of Wisdom — A cross-traditional anthology of Buddhist and secular wisdom on death and grief, compiled by Evelyn Ruut for her Alzheimer's caregiving community.
On Rebirth — Answering Nine Arguments Against the Teaching — Ajahn Punnadhammo, a Theravada monk, systematically refutes nine common arguments raised against the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth, showing that each objection misunderstands either Buddhist teaching or the nature of scientific reasoning.
Opening versus Blocking — On Honest Self-Reception and the Buddhist Path — Tang Huyen maps the Buddhist and Stoic paths as practices of radical self-opening — receiving what arises in consciousness without pushing it away — and diagnoses the opposite: blocking oneself from oneself as a mislabelled no-self.
Outside Significance — On Contrary and Contradictory Negation and the Non-Symbolic — Tang Huyen distinguishes contrary negation (not-black remains within the domain of colour) from contradictory negation (freedom is not black — the category doesn't apply at all), then argues that raw sensation in Buddhism is outside the dimension of significance and insignificance altogether: not insignificant, but beyond the reach of the category.
Pacific Coexistence — On Manner over Matter, Investment, and the Fungibility of Content — Tang Huyen distinguishes matter from manner: it is not beliefs or ideas that constitute bondage, but the degree of investment in them. With light investment, any content becomes fluff. With the right attitude — pacific coexistence with whatever arises — the content becomes fungible, and the alleviation of suffering no longer depends on what shows up.
Pacifiers for the Discursive Mind — On Riddles, Big Questions, and the Quiet Mind — Tang Huyen distinguishes two scales: the discursive mind built for daily routines and survival in the small, and the silence beyond riddles where insoluble questions dissolve. Riddles are pacifiers — the best the discursive mind can receive when it insists on asking about the unspeakable. But beyond riddles is quiescence, where a quiet mind has no questions and no problems.
Patched Bits — On Raw Sensation, Abstraction, and the Violence of the Sign — Tang Huyen takes Montaigne's 'pièces rapportées' as the key to Buddhist phenomenology: everything outside raw sensation is patched bits, assembled by the abstraction-act of mentation. Tables and chairs are products of abstraction. The 'something' super-category underlies all things including God and unreality. Negative theology and Buddhism converge: both deny that ultimate reality is a thing or object. The Caodong/Soto 'sloughing off of body and mind' is the non-symbolic state where no template is active.
Peace With Oneself — On Awakening, Reality, and the Futility of Outer Adjustment — Tang Huyen argues that Buddhist awakening is not adjustment to outer reality but reconciliation with oneself. Once peace with oneself is achieved, peace with reality follows automatically. Even ambiguity, fuzziness, and the unknown self can be lived with — in serenity and grace, all is fluff, and all is grace.
Pious Untruth — On Methods, the Unclean, and What Buddhism Really Asks Us to See — Tang Huyen defends the use of pious untruths in Buddhist practice: the effectiveness of a method has nothing to do with its factual truth. The Buddha's instruction to 'see things as they are' refers exclusively to existential items — suffering, cause, birth, death — not to objective, physical things like a tree. Buddhist cultivation operates entirely in the realm of values and meanings, not facts.
Prefabricated — On Fate, Self-Deception, and the Locked Life — Tang Huyen examines how a single fundamental choice, made in youth, can lock the entire course of a life in logical deduction — with no recovery possible afterward. A practitioner case study in the relationship between self-deception, spiritual experience, and the Buddhist demand for openness and honesty.
Prefabricated — On Fateful Choices, Peak Experiences, and the Life Pre-Ordained by Youth — Tang Huyen argues that major existential choices — especially the handling of early peak spiritual experiences — are fateful in the fullest sense: once made, the rest of life follows in logical deduction. The post traces in detail how a Usenet participant spent his adult life imprisoned by a teenage spiritual experience he refused to relinquish, building walls of self-deception that ultimately made the crash inevitable. 'His adult life was like the logical deduction from the initial choice that he made in his youth. Nothing new happened. It was all pre-fabricated.'
Propaganda and Practice — On What Buddhism Actually Offers and the Boring Truth of Nirvāṇa — Tang Huyen argues that claims about 'ultimate reality', 'suchness', and special meditative metaphysics are propaganda Buddhism uses to sell itself, obscuring the boring but sufficient truth: cultivation works because it ends suffering, which is purely internal. The only difference between samsāra and nirvāṇa is how one receives what happens. The world hasn't changed, only one's reception of it has. Selling this as 'just subjective' doesn't sound convincing enough, so Buddhism adds the zing of 'suchness'. Tang Huyen deflates the metaphysics and names the reality: reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it, what you can't wish away. You can drop it and walk free — and that is enough.
Put Down the Past — On Titthatu Pubbanto, the Path as Unloading, and Marcus Aurelius on the Present — Tang Huyen turns on the Buddhist teaching to let be — and let go of — past and future: titthatu pubbanto titthatu aparanto. The Buddhist path is unloading, not loading; all concerns about prior and posterior limits are precisely what must be cut without remainder at arhat-ship. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations II.14 closes the teaching with Stoic agreement: no one loses what they do not have.
Raw Sensation — On Bagging, the Buddhist Rejection of Oneness, and What Sensation Is Pure Of — Tang Huyen draws on MN sutta 1 to argue that Buddhism never teaches mind-unity: the Buddha rejects Oneness (ekatva), Separateness (prthaktva), and Manyness (nanatva) equally, because all are thought-up and not in sensation. Raw sensation is continuous and fully differentiated but contains no bagging — no high-level categories like self, other-minds, or the outside world. Sensation is pure of them. Why load oneself up with all such garbage?
Release versus Bondage — On the Zen Brought to the Mountain and the Dissolution of Frameworks — Tang Huyen disputes Pirsig's formulation — 'the only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there' — on precisely Buddhist grounds. Chan and Buddhism seek to go beyond existing structures and frameworks altogether, not merely to modify them. Every concept is already resistance. The idea 'self' or 'I' is the biggest resistance of all. The thin, transparent, flexible mentation that remains after practice is not the Zen you brought — it has been transformed.
Returning the Light — On Hui Guang Fan Zhao and the Reversal of Perspective — Tang Huyen explains the Chinese Chan technique of hui guang fan zhao ('returning the light to reflect backward') and fan ben huan yuan ('returning to the root and going back to the source'): the gathering of dispersed attention and its reversal inward, to look at the origin of thought itself. In those rare moments of practice, a thinning-out of thought and transparency of mind. Choiceless awareness as the result. Getting to the bottom drops the bottom out and is Nirvāṇa.
Reverse Faith — On Word Magic, Essentialist Language, and Buddhist Training Without Content — Tang Huyen argues that fierce anti-Christians accept the whole Christian worldview in deep structure — the essentialist theory of words and their meaning — and therefore remain Christians in reverse. Buddhist training, by contrast, is content-free: it leads to openness, transparence, non-resistance, and ultimate non-identification.
Right Speech — A Practitioner's Guide — Evelyn Ruut's original 2005 essay on Buddhist right speech: weaving the Abhaya Sutta's six criteria, Ayya Khema's four lines, and the Dhammapada's teaching on hate with personal reflection on internet discourse and the interdependence of speaking and listening.
Sad-Dharma and Non-Resistance — On True Teaching, Cross-Traditional Convergence, and the Behavioral Test — Tang Huyen glosses sad-dharma (true teaching, as in the Lotus Sutra's title), notes the Buddha's dismissal of his contemporaries' methods, and makes a cross-traditional claim: Stoicism, Daoism, and the Buddha's teaching share a basic orientation — non-resistance — that leads to the ending of suffering regardless of whether the practitioner has heard of Buddhism. The behavioral test follows: people claiming decades of Buddhist cultivation blow up when criticised; whatever they practice will not lead to the ending of suffering.
Seeing As It Is — On the Mahayana Critique, the Three Marks, and the Feeling of Life — Tang Huyen enters into the deepest philosophical register: the Mahayana Perfection of Wisdom tradition was right to react against imposing the Four Noble Truths and Three Marks onto sensation. Even the instruction 'in the seen, just the seen' is still in the realm of values and meanings. Nirvana and Samsara are not states of things but feelings of life — Lebensgefühl — which is why awakening requires only a change of attitude, not a change of the world.
Self-Deception as Obstacle — On Honesty to Oneself as the Sine Qua Non of Buddhist Cultivation — Tang Huyen argues that self-deception is not merely an ethical failure but a structural block on Buddhist cultivation: mindfulness requires openness of oneself to oneself, which systematic self-deception makes impossible. The central case study is practitioners who cling to spiritual experiences from their teenage years and spend their adult lives constructing elaborate fictions to pretend those experiences never left — erecting a wall between themselves and themselves that, after decades, overtakes them. They preach openness while blocking themselves from themselves. The bone in the throat that can neither be swallowed nor spat out.
Signs of Awakening — On Balance, Perspective, and the Mind That Stops Nowhere — Tang Huyen's comprehensive answer to 'how do we know if someone is enlightened?' Buddhism teaches awakening, not enlightenment. The unreadable mind (the mind that stops nowhere) is the one criterion that is not guessing. The rest: the awakened are happy, generous, magnanimous, forgiving — no self left to defend. Balance and perspective are the root of insight and wisdom; their absence is conclusive. The awakened recover from failure before others notice. They allow room for what happens to happen.
Split Personality — On the Two Voices of the Buddha in the Early Canon — Tang Huyen identifies two distinct personalities in the early Buddhist canon: the sober, straightforward Buddha who tells it as it is and teaches only what leads to liberation, and the flamboyant, Thespian Buddha who dramatises and exaggerates for effect. The former forms the core that truly liberates; the latter generates the popular religious surface that keeps Buddhism alive. Reading the canon well requires holding both in view.
Splitting the Atom — On Unity, Sensation, and the Fall into Multiplicity — Tang Huyen traces the theme of unity-before-splitting through Maimonides, Aquinas, Fénelon, Cassirer, and Hegel, then brings it home to the Buddhist view: sensation is given whole and undivided; mentation splits it into the things and objects of daily life; that splitting is the fall, and the only difference between Samsara and Nirvana.
Stopping the Elephant — On Metta, Nonresistance, and the Buddhist Contract — Tang Huyen answers whether Tibetan monks' metta could have stopped the Chinese invaders — using the question to clarify that Buddhist practice is done without worldly goals. The contract from the Buddha on down is to end suffering, not intervene in the world. Illustrated by the Shao-lin monk 'He who Sees Emptiness,' who deactivates his Diamond Indestructible Body so a thug can kill him without penalty.
Strictly Subjective — On Buddhist Freedom and the Irrelevance of Western Objectivity — Tang Huyen argues that Buddhist freedom cannot be approached 'in the language of Western objectivity' — it is strictly subjective, purely sentimental, with no objective reference. The Four Noble Truths are not empirical observations but high-level inferences. The monk being sawn apart is free to beam loving-kindness on his torturers. Freedom, like truth, cannot be pinned down.
Suffering and Its Limit — On the Three Marks and the Happiness of Nirvana — Tang Huyen corrects the common mistranslation 'all is suffering,' setting out the precise scope of the Three Marks across Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese Agama sources, and arguing that Nirvana is explicitly described by the Buddha as a state of happiness and joy.
Supernal Insight — On Buddhist Bhuuta, European Negation, and the Convergence of Traditions — Tang Huyen opens with a technical critique of the Lankavatara Sutra's bhuuta/a-bhuuta word-play — arguing that much Great Vehicle speculation reduces to mechanical contrarian negation. He then assembles a gallery of European thinkers — Eriugena, Hegel, Augustine — alongside an unnamed Hinduist poster on the newsgroup, arguing that their sayings surpass Buddhist technical jargon in philosophical penetration. All converge on the same insight: that concepts, including the highest ones, deceive when made the final object of contemplation.
Surface Beauty — On Hui-neng's Koan, Non-Composition, and Going Beyond Merit and Evil — Tang Huyen argues that Buddhist masters are teachers not teasers — the teaching of a koan is right at the surface. Hui-neng's 'not thinking good, not thinking evil, what is your original face?' is plain instruction. Two canonical citations follow: SN II.82 on the monk who does not compose and fully blows out, and Dhammapada 412 on going beyond both merit and evil.
Teachers and Students — On Authenticity, Herd Instinct, and the Mutual Selection of Teacher and Follower — Tang Huyen on what makes a genuine teacher: the test is not charisma but whether the teacher applies to himself the very norms he proclaims. A teacher who preaches no-self but reacts fiercely to challenges, who preaches freedom but selects docile students — is serving the herd instinct, not liberation. Teachers and students have a way of smelling each other out, and they grow on each other.
The Bottom Falls Off — On Calming, the Cafeteria Stack, and Standlessness as Freedom — Tang Huyen responds to the cafeteria push-down stack metaphor for consciousness with a Buddhist inversion: the path is not to push things off the top of the stack but to let them fall away until the whole cafeteria drops out. This is the difference between exclusion (muscular, deliberate) and calming (letting pass without rejection, repression, or dwelling) — and it is the latter that produces standlessness, the condition TH identifies as freedom.
The Brass Section — On Not Resisting Fear, the Grain of Salt, and Pure Openness — Tang Huyen formulates a principle that runs through all his teaching on cultivation: do not address fear or negativity directly, because direct resistance strengthens what it resists. Expand the space of tolerance instead. The Beecham conductor maxim, the Ganges salt passage, and the butterfly in the golden breeze of Autumn all carry the same instruction.
The Breath of God — On Christian Mysticism as Recycled Stoicism — Tang Huyen argues that Christian mystical practice — apatheia, désappropriation, self-annihilation — is Stoicism repackaged, and that the Holy Spirit (pneuma) is a direct borrowing from the Stoic logos. Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa are his chief examples.
The Buddha's Position on the Absence of Self — On Not-Self as Metaphysical Stance — Tang Huyen argues against the popular interpretation that the Buddha refused to take a position on the existence of self, demonstrating through canonical Pali and Chinese Agama sources that the Buddha clearly held the self to be a composition (saṅkhāra) and thus fictitious — and that Nirvāṇa is precisely the quiescing of the compositions in which self is produced.
The Cardinal Sin — On Following Speech, Kant's Error, and Buddhist Ultimate Reality — Tang Huyen on why Buddhist philosophy is fundamentally anti-Kantian: the 'thing-in-itself' is not beyond experience but is experience itself, unmediated by mentation. To follow speech to chase realities is the cardinal sin of the Buddha's Buddhism. The Hegel-Kant confrontation is used as a mirror: Kant saw thought as the veil on reality, but Buddhism dismantles the veil entirely rather than leaving it in place and calling it unknowable.
The Change — On Quiescing Thought and Language, and the Kingdom of Grace — Tang Huyen traces the self-reinforcing circle of thought and language — chunking and bagging — that perpetuates itself and us together. Mental culture is the interruption of that circle. When we quiesce thought and language, the Kingdom of Nature becomes the Kingdom of Grace, in place, by a purely subjective and strictly sentimental change. Mother Nature rewards a small internal shift with everything.
The Closed Circle — On Surrender, the Buddha's Night, and the Error of Penance — Tang Huyen explains that the greatest yield comes when one does nothing — abstains from oneself and lets nature act. He retells the Buddha's awakening: six years of tapas (penance) were an attempt to beat nature by sheer will; awakening came only when he relaxed all the way, gave up thought and volition, and did nothing. The suffering was a closed circle — himself dealing with himself alone — and its ending was equally a closed circle. The practitioners who talk liberation but practice artifice repeat the error of the six years.
The Counterpartless — On the Self-Erected Self and the Dharmadinna Dialogue — Tang Huyen on self-surrender in Buddhist practice: all barriers are self-erected, and the self stops only by stopping itself. Includes the dialogue between the nun Dharmadinnā and the layman Visākha, culminating in her answer that nirvana has no counterpart — 'your question goes too far.' Closes with practical counsel: just verify that your suffering diminishes.
The Danger of A Priori Analysis — On the Sword Analogy, Mindfulness, and the Real That Resists — Tang Huyen refutes the Nagarjuna sword/eye analogy — mind cannot see itself, just as a blade cannot cut itself — by pointing out that the mind does routinely turn back on itself, and mindfulness depends on exactly this. The deeper claim: it is a category error to use a priori conceptual analysis to adjudge what is or is not possible in a posteriori practice. The real is precisely what escapes and resists logical, conceptual, aesthetic, and moral judgment.
The Default Nobody Thought Of — On the Buddha's Night, Non-Imposition, and What Happens — Tang Huyen reconstructs the night of the Buddha's awakening in historical terms: six years of Jaina self-mortification and starvation, days from death, before he recognises the error. He takes milk. He returns to the form meditation of his youth. Then — the only option he had never explored: to give up control, volition, thought, imposition, accumulation, and simply to let go of all. Boom, he awoke. The discovery was the default that nobody thought of: pure non-resistance, leaving what happens to be just what happens, without any norm or mold imposed upon it.
The Dharma as Raft — On Structure, Not Content — Tang Huyen argues that the core misconception about Buddhism is treating its doctrines as content to believe in — when the Dharma is only a raft, a method pointing toward its own dissolution, never an end in itself.
The Dog and His Tail — On Intellectual Understanding, the Water-Snake, and Total Action — Tang Huyen turns the Buddha's water-snake parable against Buddhist intellectualism: conscious thought is the tail trying to wag the dog. Intellectual understanding of Buddhism, however precise, does not produce awakening — only actual practice does, and practice means pulling oneself together into a single piece so that one can act in total action.
The Eel — On Two-Level Mindfulness, the Crashed Mind, and the Ungraspable dedao — Tang Huyen gives a frank personal account of his mindfulness practice as a two-level system: first-level consciousness of what happens, second-level consciousness of consciousness (the 'supervisor state' that recalls the first when it slips). He contrasts this with the 'crashed people' who have lost both levels, and with dedao (Zero), who operates at near-total action — shifting shape without effort, ungraspable, always already somewhere else.
The Empty Ansatz — On Fénelon, the Diamond Scripture, and Grace That Makes No Reference — Tang Huyen on the objectless nature of grace: the prayer that is offered to nothing and nobody; the gratitude that is grateful to nothing and nobody. He cites the Diamond Scripture's unsupported thought (apratiṣṭhita-citta) and Conze and Lamotte's translations of the Perfection of Wisdom on giving without apprehending giver, gift, or recipient. Then the centrepiece: in Fénelon, God is an empty Ansatz — a pure mind-game used to annihilate the self — and when self and God are both dissolved as hypotheses, what remains is a contemplation that makes no reference to anything, is purely in and of itself, and has no limit.
The Fathom-Long Body — On Not Mentating the World, Present Sufficiency, and the Ending of Suffering — Tang Huyen invokes the Buddha's fathom-long body teaching to argue against the creationist demand for a theory of everything. The ending of suffering does not require accounting for the whole world — everything necessary is present to the senses right now, and grasping after past or future worlds blocks the very simplicity that allows liberation.
The Flowing Block — On the Vibrant Stillness of the Quiesced Mind — Tang Huyen on the paradoxical phenomenology of the quiesced mind: when mentation stills, nothing changes — except the presence, the vitality, the vibrance. And simultaneously the universe becomes a block universe in which nothing moves and everything stays where it is for all eternity. The same world, experienced as utterly dynamic and utterly static at once. He sets this against the Buddhist/Brahmanist divide: Buddhism does away with all identity; Brahmanism in all its forms retains some attenuated remainder.
The Four Divine Abodes and Their Fruits — A Comparative Study — A scholarly essay by Tang Huyen (2003) tracing the doctrinal history of the Four Brahmaviharas — friendliness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity — across early Pali, Chinese Agama, Sanskrit, and Mahayana sources, arguing that the classical understanding of these practices as 'objectless intentioning' was later reconceived in the Great Vehicle as action 'without intentioning' in the real world.
The Fuzzy Summit — On the History of Buddhist Debates on Awakening and the Summum Bonum — Tang Huyen surveys the historical Buddhist debates on awakening — reversible or not, rare or universal, gradual or sudden — and argues that the very fuzziness of these debates is itself a teaching: awakening is an attitude rather than a specific content, an episode of grace rather than an entitlement. The post closes with a practical challenge: if you have peace, harmony, and serenity, what else could you possibly want?
The Great Ungelling — On Buddhist Cosmogony, Solidification, and the Return to Flow — Tang Huyen reads the Buddhist cosmogony (Aggañña Sutta, via Warder's translation) as the story of gelling: luminous, flexible beings solidify through craving, becoming coarse, rigid, gendered, and eventually conventional. To uncoarsen is the Buddhist training in a nutshell. The Stoic parallel (God ejaculating the world in total action) illuminates what it means for the mind to open in pure flow, without remainder.
The Imaginary Arrow — On Chan Training and the Logic of Self-Inflicted Suffering — Tang Huyen argues that Buddhist cultivation — especially Chan koan practice — works by deliberately inflicting suffering on oneself, modeled on the Buddha's own Jaina years, so that seeing the gratuity of this self-infliction produces release.
The Inalienable Possession — On Grace, Adversity, and the Eternity in Every Moment — Tang Huyen responds to the question of what grace means in the place where shit happens. Grace does not eliminate adversity; it recontextualises it. For a moment, everything lights up in glory and is seen from the perspective of all eternity — and that perspective, once glimpsed, redeems everything. It is only an attitude, but it is an attitude that floats unattached like a butterfly, performs wonder unasked, and cannot be taken away. In any moment, one is always face to face with eternity without any gap in between. It is an inalienable possession.
The Innocence Factor — On Self-Honesty, the Direction of Attention, and Empty Reception — Tang Huyen's essay on the direction of attention in meditation practice — inward or outward — and the surprising conclusion that direction matters less than the practitioner's honesty with themselves. The outward direction can thrive if it is genuinely innocent of self-rejection; if it is not, it merely fortifies self-rejection recursively. The key variable in all cultivation is whether one is open and honest to oneself, or closed and dishonest. This is the innocence factor.
The Invisible Mind — On Testing Awakening, Babyishness, and the Mind That Does Not Stop — Tang Huyen on the methodology of testing claims of awakening and its limits. The awakened have gathered themselves into one piece and dropped it; they behave from a background of calm and harmlessness. Babyish reactivity — blowing up on mere words, recurrent tantrums when attainments are challenged — is the tell. But positive identification requires reading a mind that is invisible: the awakened do not stop anywhere or stand anywhere, so their mind cannot be found.
The Kingdom of Grace — On Gnostic and Stoic Worldviews and Buddha-Nature Manifestation — Tang Huyen maps two opposing worldviews — Gnostic condemnation (the world is a false god's botched work; salvation means leaving it) versus Stoic exaltation (the world is already perfect; to open yourself to God is to see the world as God sees it) — and shows how the Buddhist quiescing of thought collapses into the Stoic intuition. Pure Land, the Chan masters Hui-chung and Dōgen, and Matsumoto's scholarly distinction between Buddha-nature Immanence and Buddha-nature Manifestation theories all converge: the ultimate is what appears.
The Limiting Factor — On Thought, Quiescence, and the Ending of Suffering — Tang Huyen on thought as tool and thought as master. Thought is successful enough at navigating reality that humans don't die en masse — but it is the form into which reality must be fitted to be processed, and there can be no guarantee that form does not distort. When thought is quiesced gently, reality is free to blossom forth unhindered. From there, thought is seen as limited and limiting, distorted and distorting — useful as a tool, harmful as a master. Three canonical citations close the essay.
The Logic of All Mysticism — On the Deluded Mind, Wholeness, and Values Felt for Free — Tang Huyen characterizes the deluded mind as narrow, myopic, and self-interested — a processor focused on its own particularities. As the mind tends toward awakening it loses this focus, opens to what lies outside its own properties, and receives felt values — calm, peace, serenity, grace — unasked. The shift from detail to wholeness, from thought-up to felt experience, is not a Hindu metaphysics of Oneness but simply a structural change in attention. This transfer, TH concludes, forms the underlying logic of all mysticism.
The Non-Symbolic Mind — On Self-Sufficient Mental States and the Awakening That Changes Nothing — Tang Huyen distinguishes two kinds of mental states: those that refer to objects outside themselves (anger, bitterness, paranoia) and those that are complete in themselves and refer to nothing beyond (calm, serenity, peace). The state of non-mentation is purely non-symbolic — it has no referent. Awakening is a change of attitude only: nothing out there changes, yet everything feels wholly different. It takes no effort. It is pure reward in return for doing nothing.
The Normless and Standardless Mind — On Dropping Both Extremes and the End of All Māṇita — Tang Huyen systematically demonstrates Buddhism's demand to drop both extremes across every dimension — moral, ontological, epistemological. Drawing from the Pāli canon and Chinese Āgamas, he traces the neither-black-nor-white path through the formless attainments, through the discourse on non-composition, and through the Dhammapada's vision of one who has transcended merit and evil alike. The post ends with the Hui-neng koan on the original face.
The Object and the Absence of the Object — On Desire, Mentation, and the Strifeless — Tang Huyen argues that without desire to fuel the mind, there are no 'things' or 'objects' — drawing a precise parallel between Leibniz and Kant on time and space as thought-up relations, the Buddhist doctrine of the strifeless (araṇa), and the Great Vehicle teaching that past, present, and future thoughts cannot be grasped.
The Parable of the Saw — On Friendliness Without Condition and the Eye of God — Tang Huyen on the resistance that arises from the self, and the training beyond it. Quotes the Parable of the Saw in full — the Buddha's most extreme formulation of mettā: even if thieves cut you limb from limb, set no mind at enmity. Closes with Henri Niel on Hegel and God: 'Loving God is less thinking about Him than seeing all things with His eyes.'
The Path from Mindfulness to Mindlessness — On the Discriminating Mind, Quiescence, and the World That Lights Up — A warm, accessible account of why Buddhist cultivation culminates in mindlessness rather than more or better thinking. Tang Huyen describes the discriminating mind as a spoon trying to empty the ocean — adequate for daily affairs, but compulsively overrunning its target. One moment of the quiesced mind throws everything else into balance and perspective. The path: pay attention to what happens in the moment, do not divert to past or future, until mindfulness yields to mindlessness and the world lights up in charm.
The Perfect Box — On the Three Great Options and the Fungibility of Content — Tang Huyen maps the three fundamental worldview choices — essentialist or conventionalist language, objectivist or subjectivist truth, de re or de mente reasoning — and shows that Buddhist practice resolves all three by making content fungible: once one acts in detachment and equanimity, it does not matter whether what comes is Nirvāṇa or Samsara, God or the Devil.
The Perfection of Fluff — On Buddhist Teachings as Self-Canceling Rafts — Tang Huyen argues that the Buddha's teaching is self-canceling by design — the doctrine of emptiness applies to itself, the Perfection of Wisdom scriptures deny that the Buddha ever spoke, and the awakened practitioner is trackless and traceless in the canonical tradition.
The Poverty of Presumption — On Ego as Shield, False Attainment, and the Test of Awakening — Tang Huyen's most concentrated critique of Buddhist practitioners who use awakening as an ego-shield. Buddhist attainment is defined as the stopping of induction from the logical-ideal to the real — letting the real be the real. Those who claim attainment while remaining edgy, jumpy, and reactive confuse the goal with its opposite: they use awakening to aggrandise the self they claim to have dissolved.
The Raft and Its End — On Nistha, the Telos of Liberation, and Expedient Means — Tang Huyen grounds the raft metaphor in specific canonical citations: nistha/nittha (Sanskrit/Pali for telos, end, ultimate) as what the arhat arrives at in the seen things; MA 200 and MN I.135 on the raft for crossing, not holding; SN IV.236 on the joy of the liberated mind. Synthesis: there is no true method apart from expedient means, and the end should not be attached to — if it is attached to, you have not reached it.
The Realm of Buddha and the Realm of the Devil — On the Handling of Peak Experiences — Tang Huyen on the Chan distinction between the realm of Buddha and the realm of the devil (Mara-dhatu). Whether a spiritual experience — ordinary or extraordinary — belongs to Buddha or to Mara has nothing to do with its content and everything to do with how one handles it. Cling to it, and it becomes the realm of the devil. Release it, and it becomes the realm of Buddha. He closes with the central point: once you understand how to drop, the entire canon of Buddhism and every Buddhist teacher become unnecessary.
The Scope of Suffering — On the Three Seals and the Quiescing of Compositions — Tang Huyen on whether suffering in Buddhism extends to all of life or only to the compositions (saṅkhāra). Through a careful reading of the Three Seals of the Law — tracing the distinction between saṅkhāra and dhamma — he arrives at a precise account of Nirvana: not the unconditioned, but the uncomposed. The freed person remains in the world; he simply no longer composes.
The Seedless Seed — On Teaching, the Invisible Awakened, and the Karma of Combat — Tang Huyen on Buddhist teaching as listening and pointing to the student's seed of awakening — a seed that has no sign or form and can be seen only when all signs and forms are dropped. Because it has nothing particular about it, it is the least personal thing one possesses. He closes with the mechanics of dharma combat: the ego wants to be seen and so always exposes itself, while the quiesced teacher is fully invisible, serving only as a mirror. Blowback is the rule.
The Self Is a False Problem — On Buddhist Critique and the Return to Raw Sensation — Tang Huyen argues that the Buddha anticipated modern critical philosophy by understanding the self as a false problem built on language, and that Nirvāṇa is simply the calming of all compositions — the return to raw sensation stripped of all mentation.
The Switch — On the Buddha's Awakening as Release from Control-Madness — Tang Huyen reconstructs the arc of the Buddha's awakening: six years of exhausting Jaina self-mortification, the sudden reversal, and the boom of release. Awakening was not a doctrine attained but a switch thrown — from total effortfulness to total effortlessness, total resistance to total non-resistance. The only requirement was letting go.
The Tautological Form — On Buddhism's Only Possible Logic — Tang Huyen argues that tautology is the only possible logical form for Buddhist propositions — the only form that makes direct reference to reality (suffering and its ending) rather than trapping Buddhism in circles. The example: 'you yourself cause suffering to yourself, therefore stop causing suffering to yourself.' Applied to a questioner troubled by thoughts of mortality, perfection, and justice: the remedy is to stop imposing these fantasies on reality and leave reality alone. The simplicity of this is exactly what a tautology is.
The Twelve Links — A Teaching Compilation on Dependent Origination — Evelyn Ruut's curated teaching on paticca-samuppada for soc.religion.eastern, compiling the classic twelve-links formula from the Samyutta Nikaya and the complete Maha-nidana Sutta (Digha Nikaya 15) — the Buddha's definitive discourse on dependent co-arising, the mutual conditioning of name-and-form and consciousness, seven stations of consciousness, and eight emancipations.
The Universe Sings Its Song — On Delusion as A Priori, Non-Action, and Surrender — Tang Huyen's most lyrical post: delusion is the induction from the logical-ideal to the real, the imposition of the a priori on the a posteriori. Awakening is the stopping of that — freeing the real from constraint. In those moments of quiesced mentation, the universe glows with coherence, harmony, rightness, justice — not as a thought but as a feeling. The mystic tradition of surrendering to God and Buddhist surrender to what happens converge. The universe will sing its song to you unasked.
The Unobtainable — On the Self, Fetters, and the Liberation That Cannot Be Willed — Tang Huyen's sharpest formulation of the paradox at the heart of liberation: the self cannot drop the self because the self is unobtainable and cannot be made known as real and established in the present things. The Buddha's realisation was precisely this: what was to be dropped could not be dropped, and that realisation freed him. Canonical citations from the Chinese Madhyama-Āgama 200 and Saṃyuktāgama 104. Tang Huyen closes: the entire Perfection of Wisdom corpus is presaged in those few lines.
The Vast Sky — On Mental Cultivation, the Capacity for Containment, and the White Cloud Passing — Tang Huyen offers the most compressed summary of awakening he knows: 'The vast sky does not hinder white clouds from flying.' The post argues that Buddhist and Daoist cultivation consist in expanding the mind's capacity for containment and flexibility of structure — a preparation that, if genuinely made, renders any crash, however severe, a mere speed-bump.
The Vulnerable Type — On Deep Happiness, Self-Blocking, and Identification with the Aggressor — Tang Huyen identifies the most vulnerable type in Buddhist practice: the person who blocks themselves from themselves to protect themselves from themselves. Such people cannot benefit from Buddhist cultivation, which requires honesty and openness to oneself. The crash that comes is compounded by identification with the aggressor — and Buddhist cultivation, had it been practised, would have allowed the crash to be weathered.
Those Who Expose an Opening — On Self-Peace, Rules, and the Vulnerability of the Unliberated Mind — Tang Huyen analyses two newsgroup combatants as a case study in Buddhist psychology: the one who has mastered thought and language as a medium versus the one enslaved to it. Those not at peace with themselves will reify their opponent's words, make them hard and real, and impale themselves on them — all unasked. Those fully reconciled with themselves cannot be touched: they perceive hostile intentions instantly and laugh them off.
Thought and Thing — On Space, Time, and the Constructs of Mind — Tang Huyen argues that space, time, and all 'things' are thought-up constructs (Leibniz/Kant), and that Buddhist practice is the practical enactment of relinquishing them — arriving at objectless, undivided sensation, freed from tending and grasping.
Thoughtlessness — On Non-Mentation and the Early Canon — Tang Huyen argues that the early canon — the Buddha, Nāgārjuna, and Āryadeva — explicitly teaches non-mentation (nis-cinta) as the defining characteristic of Nirvāṇa, against the common claim that Buddhism is a tradition of rational verbal instruction.
Tibetan Buddhism and the Vajrayana Path — A Practitioner's Guide to the Tools — Evelyn Ruut, a longtime Vajrayana practitioner, explains the tools of Tibetan Buddhist practice — visualizations, mantras, ritual, meditation, intellect, teacher, koans — and argues that all of them point ultimately to emptiness and inner transformation, not outer authority.
Total Action — On Anaxagoras, Dōgen, and the Babyishness Test — Tang Huyen draws together Anaxagoras on divine wholeness and Dōgen on total action to describe what awakening produces: one who moves as a unit, not as loose fragments working at cross-purposes. The awakeneds are fully grown adults who additionally drop their self. The eliminative test: babyishness — jumpy, edgy, impetuous, tantrums when challenged — instantly disqualifies. The Abhidharma and Great Vehiclistic speculation are the mind making something detrimental appear useful to shore up its own existence.
Total Action, Non-Action, and the Dissolution of Self — Tang Huyen's philosophical essay on self-dissolution as precondition for total action, with parallels from Dogen, Anaxagoras, Kant, Fénelon, and the Parable of the Saw.
Toys for Use — On the Buddha's Multi-Level Teaching, Contradictory Negation, and Nirvāṇa as Non-Doing — Tang Huyen explicates the Buddha's two-level teaching strategy: kamma-vāda (the doctrine of action) for social morality, and an-abhisaṅkhāra (non-doing) for awakening. Using Pāli canon citations and a closing passage from Augustine's De Trinitate, he shows that the two teachings are not contradictory but operate on different logical planes — one a contrary negation within a dimension, the other a contradictory negation that steps outside it entirely.
Trimmings — On Buddhism’s Three-Pass Response to Nisargadatta — Tang Huyen applies Buddhism’s via negativa in three precise passes to Nisargadatta Maharaj’s aphorism about seeing nothing and seeing everything. First pass: remove the ‘I am’. Second pass: remove ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’. Third pass: remove the ideals and live life in the raw. Whatever remains is spontaneous and spacious.
Troll or Teacher — On the Buddhist Teacher as Empty Mirror — Tang Huyen argues that the troll and the Buddhist teacher are structurally equivalent — both serve as blank mirrors that provoke self-disclosure. Appended: Tyree Hilkert's 1999 post on the parallel between Vajrayana guru devotion and psychoanalytic transference.
Turning Back the Light — On Eko Hensho, Chinese Chan, and the Discrete Origin of Thought — Tang Huyen traces the Japanese Zen term eko hensho to its Chinese Chan roots — hui guang fan zhao (returning the light to reflect backward) and fan ben huan yuan (returning to the root and going back to the source). The technique: gather dispersed attention, turn it inward, search up the stream of consciousness toward the very origin of thought. Connected to the most famous Chan public case (who is mindful of the Buddha?), to Krishnamurti on the discrete nature of thought, and to the counter-tradition of Molinos and Hal Hesse that rejects any self-reflection. A full account of the practice and its debates.
Turning Backward — On hui-guang fan-zhao and the Shurangama's Recursive Awareness — Tang Huyen refutes the a priori claim that awareness cannot be self-aware, drawing on the Chinese technical term hui-guang fan-zhao (turning back the light to reflect it on itself) and four citations from the Shurangama scripture — Avalokiteśvara's 'Because I don't contemplate the sound but contemplate he who contemplates,' the Buddha's instruction to Ānanda to 'hear backward into your nature.' Consciousness turns on itself; the Shurangama depends on it.
Two Strategies — On Contemplation, Intervention, and the Contradiction in Popular Buddhism — Tang Huyen identifies two incompatible value-sets at the heart of popular Buddhist ethics: passive contemplation (leaving the world in its suchness, untouched) versus active intervention (imposing one's moral-aesthetic preferences on what happens). They cannot be held simultaneously — only serially. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; Communism began as a humanitarian revolt. Wisdom may lead to explicit non-intervention.
Unnegotiable — On Transcendence, the Lotus in Mud, and the Awakening That Has No Price — Tang Huyen defines transcendence as the characteristic that overflows all limits, all containments, all boxes. Using the Satan/Milton contrast and the Buddhist Parable of the Saw, he argues that evolution grows — as accidental by-products — traits perpendicular to survival; and that awakening is exactly such an excess: unnegotiable, without price, worthwhile for that reason.
Unreserved Manifestation — On German Idealism and the Diamond Sutra's Unsupported Mind — Tang Huyen marshals four passages from Hegel and one from Schopenhauer to argue for Buddha-nature Manifestation theory: the world is absolutely true in itself; only our knowing is phenomenon; without thought and the categories, there is only sensation, flowing and fully differentiated — the sole ultimate reality. The Diamond Sutra's 'unsupported thought' is the practical consequence.
Vertigo — On Buddhist Flux, the Thaetetus, and the Ambiguity of Names — Tang Huyen traces the convergence between Buddhist impermanence and dependent arising, Heraclitean flux as reconstructed in Plato's Thaetetus, the Scripture on Ultimate Emptiness, and Chrysippus on the ambiguity of all words — arguing that the Buddha's insight into the unspeakability of self-existent things has independent precedents in Greek philosophy.
Virtuous Circle of Thriving — On Bonehead Buddhism, Debate as Practice, and the Self-Feeding Energy of Equanimity — Tang Huyen argues that debates and disputes are an excellent testing ground for Buddhist cultivation — but only for those who have implemented, not merely proclaimed, detachment and equanimity. The practitioner who remains above it all in a debate enters a virtuous circle: equanimity feeds on itself, energy multiplies, and the debate becomes fuel for further training.
What Appears — On Tathagatagarbha, the Unpatched, and the Integrity of Manifestation — Continuation of the Patched Bits exchange: Tang Huyen defends raw sensation as Quietist, Pyrrhonian, and non-dual by nature. Drawing on Shiro Matsumoto's distinction between Buddha-nature Immanence theory and Buddha-nature Manifestation theory, and quoting Hui-chung, Dogen, and Hsuean-sha, he argues that what is manifest in phenomenal life is already ultimate — the unpatched basis of all patched bits. The Greek word phainomenon (what appears) is the key: one does not need to go elsewhere, for the ultimate is already fully manifest.
What More — On Nirvāṇa as the In-Situ Cessation of the Three Poisons — Tang Huyen argues from Pāli and Chinese canonical sources that Nirvāṇa is not a transcendent realm but an aspect of the same world — the in-situ cessation of the three poisons — and draws a precise parallel between wu-wei (Daoism), Kant's Nichtstun, and the Buddha's non-composition.
Where God Is — On the Domains of Buddha and Māra, and the Manner of Liberation — Tang Huyen maps Buddhist liberation onto the language of God and Māra: awakening is the domain of the Buddha (where thought ceases), delusion is the domain of Māra (the domain of thought). Drawing on the Saṃyutta Nikāya, the Saṃyukta-Āgama, the Pita-putra-saṃgama-sūtra, and the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra, he traces the canonical equation: thinking binds one to Māra; not thinking releases one from Māra. Liberation occurs in situ. The only difference between awakening and delusion is manner, not matter.
Where It Is At — On Surrender, Absence of Place, and Acting from Abundance — Tang Huyen articulates the dialectics of mental culture: one acts from strength, not weakness; from abundance, not indigence; from absence of place, not any place. The governing paradox — surrender presupposes control — explains why pulling oneself together into a single piece is the precondition for letting it all go.
Whole and Part — On Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Turn from Things to Mind — Tang Huyen distinguishes Stoic/Hegelian holism (about things, de re) from Buddhist holism (about the discursive mind, de intellectu): Stoicism teaches that no part is real apart from the whole; Buddhism teaches that we receive the whole in sensation, divide it by concepts, and awakening is stopping that division.
Wholeness First — On Developmental Prerequisites, Unfinished Business, and the Zeigarnik Path to Awakening — Tang Huyen argues that Buddhist cultivation is developmental learning built on normal psychological growth. Citing the Zeigarnik effect, psychoanalysis, and his own observations from talk.religion.buddhism over decades, he shows that Buddhism requires wholeness as prerequisite — the spiritually diseased cannot be helped by it — and that resolving one's unfinished business all the way is itself awakening.
Wholeness Without Object — On Thought, Intuition, and the Five Aggregates — Tang Huyen traces the paradox at the heart of Buddhist awakening: in the state without thought there is intuition of the whole but no objects — tables, chairs, and the self are fictions carved from the sense-field by mentation, and suffering is the resistance we offer to flowing reality by mistaking those fictions for real.
Whoring — On Buddhism's Perpetual Balancing Act Between Purity and the World — Tang Huyen argues that Buddhism, like orchestras that schedule war horses to fund serious works, has always had to 'whore' itself to the unwashed masses in order to survive and preserve its core message. The Buddhist tradition consecrates this accommodation as loka-anuvartana (bending with the world) and personifies it in Avalokiteśvara, who appears in whatever form to save whatever being. The result is a perpetual tension between transcending the world and relying on the world to do so — a tension every practitioner faces moment to moment.