Friday, August 28, 2009

...the best you can say is "not two."



If you want to describe its essence,
the best you can say is "not two." 
In this "not two nothing is separate and
nothing in the world is excluded. —Trust in Mind

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I need a tutorial on this one. H.

Kim Mosley said...

[Buddhism] also understands a specificity of thing-event to be a recapitulation of the whole; parts and the whole are to be lived in an inseparable relationship through an exercise of nondiscriminatory wisdom, without prioritizing the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, and vice versa. As such, Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” i.e., “positionless position,” where “not two” signals a negation of the stance that divides the whole into two parts, i.e., dualism, while “not one” designates a negation of this stance when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation, i.e., non-dualism. Free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen's achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot, however, be confined to either dualism or non-dualism (i.e., neither “not one” nor “not two”). From: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/

Reflections on Talks on Buddha's Lists

During a recent Appamada Intensive our students gave talks on Buddha's lists. Here are my reflections on their talks.