5/23 - Interdependence and the Middle Way p. 97

[CharlesC]

Re: 5/23 - Interdependence and the Middle Way p. 97

Charles, maybe you have to give up the idea of solutions and things that work for you and just stay open to what is in the present moment. I had a debate about the idea of self with some guys on a philosophy forum a while back. I noticed a view kept coming up that things have to make sense. Why? The world is a pretty crazy place if you ask me. Philosophers like Camus have noticed the absurdity of life. Another was that they had to make sense to us humans - which is a bit anthropocentric,

Gassho,
John

Hi John – I take your point. However I'm keen to understand interdependence and non-existence of the self because they seem to be central to a lot of what Uchiyama is talking about and of course central to Buddhism. It bugs me that I am following a Buddhist practice yet I can't grasp some core Buddhist concepts. I'll put these questions to one side for the time being – once I have replied to Irina that is :-) – but I'm hoping something will sink in while we study the rest of the book.

[CharlesC]

Re: 5/23 - Interdependence and the Middle Way p. 97

Hi Irina - thanks for giving me more to think about

The body and mind exist but say memories alone do not constitute your SELF as such, do they? That I have acted a certain way (or am more inclined to act that way) does not make me this or that kind of person, does it? In each and every moment I get to choose what kind of person I am if I am fully present and don't go on auto-pilot. What if we use memories to prevent us from hitting the same wall twice and not use them as blueprints for future actions. Besides, memories are never really true, they are always tinted with our emotional state. Does it make sense?

If the self is non-existent, who or what is doing the choosing about what kind of person you are? If we are nothing but a bunch of aggregates which are interdependent on everything else then maybe once we saw this clearly we would give up trying to choose and just live the life of who we already are. Perhaps by doing zazen we learn to drop these thoughts of choosing which lead to so much dissatifaction and live in our natural state which is (hopefully!) full of joy and compassion?

I had to interrupt my train of thought earlier. I can see what you mean. You see continuity but in what? If you ask the What- is -the-self question what would your answer include? I guess you would list a number of things you mentioned before: mind, body, memories and a number of others. But what are those if not aggregates? Just like furniture (or what is left of it :wink: ) - a sitting bag, an arm chair, a bookshelf - are the aggregates of my room. Ok, what remains if you remove all those aggregates? In Western philosophy it is understood that if you remove the aggregates what remains is the essence of the room. Buddhists that have attained realisation confirm that if you remove those aggregates of the self (that you admitted are changing all the time :wink: ) what remains is... nothing. And... everything! :lol: And precisely because you have this everyhting you are not so very different and separate from the person next door.

Yes, I do see continuity but I think I am beginning to understand that it is continuity that only exists in dependence on other things. There is nothing that exists separate from everything else, no essence as you put it.

The poem by Thich Nhat Hanh presents a beautiful vision of what might be possible.

[Bansho]

Re: 5/23 - Interdependence and the Middle Way p. 97

Hi everyone,

Wow, great discussion going on here. I’m a bit behind on the book, so please forgive me if I throw something in which goes back to the text. Please carry on and just ignore me. :wink:

"Because this exists, that exists; because this arises, that arises."

The entire teaching of interdependence and the Middly Way is explained in this one quotation. Moreover, what is expressed here is the very essence of the spirit that developed as Mahayana Buddhism. Although the language of this passage is so simple it is not easily understood, we can try to get a sense of it in terms of everyday life.

Yes, this is very true. It’s a simple, but powerful statement which can be used as a basis for explaining numerous aspects of our Practice. Traditionally it applies to the 'glue' which holds together the 12 links in the chain of co-dependent origination, but it can also be used to explain no-self, impermanence, the Middle Way, emptiness, etc. There’s one thing to beware of as it’s expressed here, however. It’s not the case that ‚this‘ causes ‚that‘ to exist/arise, but rather it is a condition. For that reason, a better translation might be "When this exists, that exists; when this arises, that arises". For example, one could say that when life exists, death exists, when there is life, there is death. However, this doesn’t mean that life causes death. Life is perfectly life as it is, death is perfectly death as it is. Life does not become death, death does not become life, and yet life cannot exist without death, nor death without life.

For Dogen Zenji, the same applies to delusion and enlightenment. It is not the case that we strive to eradicate delusion once and for all in favor of enlightenment. Without delusion, enlightenment cannot exist, just as light alone is useless unless there is darkness to illuminate. Awakening is not a matter of sudden vs. gradual, or before vs. after, but rather it is a continual dynamic interplay between the two which realizes the nondual by virtue of these two interdependent aspects. In a previous chapter of this book, "Waking up to Zazen", Uchiyama Roshi describes this in his own words as follows:

Actually, zazen is not just being somehow glued to line ZZ‘. Doing zazen is a continuation of this kind of returning up from sleepiness and down from chasing after thoughts. That is, the posture of waking up and returning to ZZ‘ at any time is itself zazen. This is one of the most vital points regarding zazen. When we are doing zazen line ZZ‘, or just doing zazen, represents our reality, so it is essential to maintain that line. Actually, ZZ‘ represents the reality of the posture of zazen, but the reality of our life is not just ZZ‘. If it were only ZZ‘, we would be as unchanging and lifeless as a rock! Although we aim at the line ZZ‘, we can never actually adhere to it, because it (ZZ‘) does not exist by itself. Nevertheless, we keep aiming at ZZ‘, because it is through clinging to thoughts that we keep veering away from it. The very power to wake up to ZZ‘ and return to it is the reality of the life of zazen.

Gassho
Ken

[John]

Re: 5/23 - Interdependence and the Middle Way p. 97

I like Barry Magid's take on this, derived from Wittgenstein, about the way words mislead us into believing that the things they represent are more substantial than they are:

“.....A substantive [noun] misleads us into looking for a substance." Wittgenstein called this "Socrates' Problem," because Plato famously had Socrates ask how we can understand the meaning of the word "good" in all its various contexts (a good man, a good hammer, a good meal, a good life etc., etc. ) unless we understand what the "Good" is in and of itself.
To Wittgenstein's list of misleading substantives, Buddhism most notably would add the word "self." Buddha's declaration that the self is "empty" is exactly Wittgenstein's point about time and truth and the good and so on. To say the self is empty doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Rather, emptiness means that the self has no fixed, inner non-changing essence that defines it. Self is a myriad. We can use the word to cover both our sense of extension over time - the feeling that somehow I'm the same person I was as a child - and for the constantly changing ungraspable flow of consciousness. Which is the "true" self? That question, the basis for so many koans, immediately leads us astray. "Self" is not a single thing in a thousand guises; it is the thousand guises themselves. To understand the self is to allow ourselves to experience the full range of its seeming contradictory manifestations. Now this, now that. Only when we try to grasp an essence or assert the priority of one aspect of self-experience over another do we find ourselves entangled philosophical brambles with very real emotional thorns.
Wittgenstein repeatedly says that the job of philosophy is not to answer questions like these, but to dissolve them, to show that they are nothing but pseudo-problems thrown up by particular aspects of our language……

http://www.ordinarymind.com/dharma_beingtime.html

Gassho,
John

[CinnamonGal]

Re: 5/23 - Interdependence and the Middle Way p. 97

Hi Charles

If the self is non-existent, who or what is doing the choosing about what kind of person you are?

This is a good one :lol: One could say it is just the mind but I know from personal experience that the emotional state and the way I am able to reason and therefore the decisions I make in each particular moment to a large degree depend on the body (even what I ate or better example yet when I am very hungry adn blood sugar is low so the primary brain kicks in and makes me get something, in winter it can be the shortage of the sun light and vitamin D). So I guess it would be all of those aggregates together. :roll:

I believe that compassion is a bonus: once you realise you share a lot with the person you meet in the street (a LOT :wink: ) you cannot

not

be compassionate. I guess what one needs then is to learn to be compassionate to oneself to begin with (in Vipassana during the Meta Meditation the meditator usually wishes herself/himself peace and health etc to begin with).

Yes, I do see continuity but I think I am beginning to understand that it is continuity that only exists in dependence on other things. There is nothing that exists separate from everything else, no essence as you put it.

Thanks for bringing this up, Charles. :lol:
In the absence of the essence, let us sit with what is. :-)

Joyfully interdependent,

I.

[John]

Re: 5/23 - Interdependence and the Middle Way p. 97

If the self is non-existent, who or what is doing the choosing about what kind of person you are?

This is a good one :lol: One could say it is just the mind but I know from personal experience that the emotional state and the way I am able to reason and therefore the decisions I make in each particular moment to a large degree depend on the body (even what I ate or better example yet when I am very hungry adn blood sugar is low so the primary brain kicks in and makes me get something, in winter it can be the shortage of the sun light and vitamin D). So I guess it would be all of those aggregates together. :roll:

Yes - that's the big question, Charles. If there is no-one there how do we, or can we, make any choices at all? :? What Irina says seems right to me - what we do is so determined, even the way we reason about things depends on our educational background. But there is awareness arising out of these aggregates? Jundo might say we simultaneously have free will and are also constrained by the 'chain of co-dependent origination' as Kenneth puts it?

Gassho,
John