Thoughts on Twenty-One

I inserted a sentence in brackets in the translation to try to clarify what Red Pine meant.

It is truly a wonderful and adaptable teaching that reminds us not to cling to it. Dharma teachings are like rafts, to be abandoned when we have crossed the river. Or like B. says, we can even transcend the raft and swim across. After all `sticking to rafts' is itself a raft to eventually be abandoned. My own ideas and conceptualizations about Buddhism have changed since I first began studying it. The thing I have taken away as primary is to constantly examine my own ideas, especially those I'm afraid of. This is a dharma teaching which is no-dharma teaching, because it is a teaching which seeks to liberate us from teachings.

Thich Nhat Hanh has compared the Diamond Cutter Sutra to a piece of music, and I begin to see what he means, as we see different themes repeated in slightly different contexts and recombined in novel fashions. For example, Subhuti keeps bringing up these 'future beings,' and Buddha responds differently each time, depending on the context. Since he had just been talking about the unreality of his teaching, it makes sense that he now dwells on the unreality of future beings. In Red Pine's book he includes commentary by a lots of different people, and there is moderate but not impressive agreement about what Buddha meant here. One way to summarize is that beings who believe this teaching are trying to liberate themselves from the concepts of `self' and `being.' So they are `no-beings.' On the other hand, the liberation is never complete, so they are also `beings.' One could also think of other ways they are beings and no-beings. For example, there's a fairly obvious sense in which the future doesn't exist, and so future beings are also no-beings in that sense. And Buddha's comments may be taken to also mean that you should both worry and not worry about future beings. Have compassion for them, as part of your bodhisattva vow, but don't obsess about them and don't invent reality surrounding them, since the future is indistinct. This same principle applies to most of present humanity. We will never meet most of the billions of people now living, but we should still care and be compassionate about them. On the other hand, we shouldn't invent reality surrounding them. Accept what we know about them and no more. If you assume something about someone you don't know, it is usually an extreme oversimplification and is often plain wrong. Psychology studies have found that people tend to characterize their acquaintances by very simple mental models, thinking of them as unchanging and unvariable, compared to their own minds, which are constantly changing. So in a very real sense, our conceptions of others do not reflect reality.

Well, anyway, that's all for now.