Sunday 31 May 2015
KENSHO, [HAKUIN]
Hakuin
The Importance of Kensho
At present, we are infested in this country with a race of smooth-tongued, worldly-wise Zen teachers who feed their students a ration of utter nonsense. "Why do you suppose Buddha-patriarchs through the ages were so mortally afraid of words and letters?" they ask you. "It is," they answer, "because words and letters are a coast of rocky cliffs washed constantly by vast oceans of poison ready to swallow your wisdom and drown the life from it. Giving students stories and episodes from the Zen past and having them penetrate their meaning is a practice that did not start until after the Zen school had already branched out into the Five Houses, and they were developing into the Seven Schools. Koan study represents a provisional teaching aid which teachers have devised to bring students up to the threshold of the house of Zen so as to enable them to enter the dwelling itself. It has nothing directly to do with the profound meaning of the Buddha-patriarchs' inner chambers."An incorrigible pack of skinheaded mules has ridden this teaching into a position of dominance in the world of Zen. You cannot distinguish master from disciple, jades from common stones. They gather and sit - rows of sleepy inanimate lumps. They hug themselves, self-satisfied, imagining they are the paragons of the Zen tradition. They belittle the Buddha- patriarchs of the past. While celestial phoenixes linger in the shadows, starving away, this hateful flock of owls and crows rule the roost, sleeping and stuffing their bellies to their hearts' content.
If you don't have the eye of kensho, it is impossible for you to use a single drop of the Buddha's wisdom. These men are heading straight for the realms of hell. That is why I say: if upon becoming a Buddhist monk you do not penetrate the Buddha's truth, you should turn in your black robe, give back all the donations you have received, and revert to being a layman.
Don't you realize that every syllable contained in the Buddhist canon - all five thousand and forty-eight scrolls of scripture - is a rocky cliff jutting into deadly, poison-filled seas? Don't you know that each of the twenty-eight Buddhas and six Buddhist saints is a body of virulent poison? It rises up in monstrous waves that blacken the skies, swallow the radiance of the sun and moon, and extinguishes the light of the stars and planets.
It is there as clear and stark as could be. It is staring you right in the face. But none of you is awake to see it. You are like owls that venture out into the light of day, their eyes wide open, yet they couldn't even see a mountain were it towering in front of them. The mountain doesn't have a grudge against owls that makes it want to hide. The fault is with the owls alone.
You might cover your ears with your hands. You might put a blindfold over your eyes. Try anything you can think of to avoid these poisonous fumes. But you can't escape the clouds sailing in the sky, the streams tumbling down the hillsides. You can't evade the falling autumn leaves scattering spring flowers.
You might wish to enlist the aid of the fleetest winged demon you can find. If you plied him with the best of food and drink and crossed his paw with gold, you might get him to take you on his back for a couple of circumnavigations of the earth. But you would still not find so much as a thimbleful of ground where you could hide.
I am eagerly awaiting the appearance of some dimwit of a monk (or barring that, half such a monk) richly endowed with a natural stock of spiritual power and kindled within by a raging religious fire, who will fling himself unhesitatingly into the midst of this poison and instantly die the Great Death. Rising from that Death, he will arm himself with a calabash of gigantic size and roam the great earth seeking true and genuine monks. Wherever he encounters one, he will spit in his fists, flex his muscles, fill his calabash with deadly poison and fling a dipperful of it over him, drenching him head to foot, so that he too is forced to surrender his life. Ah! what a magnificent sight to behold!
The Zen priests of today are busily imparting a teaching to their students that sounds something like this:
"Don't misdirect your efforts. Don't chase around looking for something apart from your own selves. All you have to do is to concentrate on being thoughtless, on doing nothing whatever. No practice. No realization. Doing nothing, the state of no-mind, is the direct path of sudden realization. No practice, no realization - that is the true principle, things as they really are. The enlightened ones themselves, those who possess every attribute of Buddhahood, have called this supreme, unparalleled, right awakening."
People hear this teaching and try to follow it. Choking off their aspirations. Sweeping their minds clean of delusive thoughts. They dedicate themselves solely to doing nothing and to making their minds complete blanks, blissfully unaware that they are doing and thinking a great deal.
When a person who has not had kensho reads the Buddhist scriptures, questions his teachers and fellow monks about Buddhism, or practices religious disciplines, he is merely creating the causes of his own illusion - a sure sign that he is still confined within samsara. He tries constantly to keep himself detached in thought and deed, and all the while his thoughts and deeds are attached. He endeavors to be doing nothing all day long, and all the while he is busily doing.
But if this same person experiences kensho, everything changes. Although he is constantly thinking and acting, it is totally free and unattached. Although he is engaged in activity around the clock, that activity is, as such, non-activity. This great change is the result of his kensho. It is like water that snakes and cows drink from the same cistern, which becomes deadly venom in one and milk in the other.
Bodhidharma spoke of this in his Essay on the Dharma pulse:
If someone without kensho tries constantly to make his thoughts free and unattached, he commits a great transgression against the Dharma and is a great fool to boot. He winds up in the passive indifference of empty emptiness, no more able to distinguish good from bad than a drunken man. If you want to put the Dharma of non- activity into practice, you must bring an end to all your thought-attachments by breaking through into kensho. Unless you have kensho, you can never expect to achieve a state of non-doing.
***
The following are from: 'Beyond Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems'by Ko Un
*THE HERMIT*
Jang Ku-Song the hermit was busy shitting
when he heard frogs croaking.
It made him recite
The croaking of frogs on moonlit nights
in early spring pierces the world from end to end, makes us all one family.
Look, if you've had your shit,
wipe yourself and get out of here.
*A SHOOTING STAR* Wow! You recognized me.
Saturday 30 May 2015
Tormentil
Speaking ahead of his successful homecoming performance at the Liverpool Echo Arena this week former Beatles and current musical icon Sir Paul McCartney revealed how he gave up cannabis for his family, how he keeps himself young and who really wears the trousers in his house.
Thanks to daily headstands and liberal application of his wife’s moisturiser Sir Paul is 72 going on 27.
With five decades in the music business behind him, he is rock royalty but as fit and healthy as ever.
......He also describes his Liverpudlian family as “wiser than any President or Prime Minister I have ever met.”
He adds: “I do get recognised but if I’m just going for a quiet little country walk, I might meet a bird watcher or two but they’re not going to bother me; they are far more interested in the Peregrine falcon.
“I have quite a lot of family and when I was growing up it was in a real, good, ordinary family – you couldn’t really get away with anything.
“A lot of people can’t be bothered going back to their hometowns, but I really value it.
“If you’re lucky and come from a good family then that’s how you learn. You do just think, ‘Ok, I won’t be a complete tosser.’”
Wondering, what, 'Tormentil',is?..
Look ,it ,up!..
Friday 29 May 2015
Thursday 28 May 2015
Symbolic Logic,Part,2-Kronecker
Leopold Kronecker, famous for his assertion that "God made the integers, all else is the work of man"[5] had his foes, among them Hilbert. Hilbert called Kronecker a "dogmatist, to the extent that he accepts the integer with its essential properties as a dogma and does not look back"[6] and equated his extreme constructivist stance with that of Brouwer'sintuitionism, accusing both of "subjectivism": "It is part of the task of science to liberate us from arbitrariness, sentiment and habit and to protect us from the subjectivism that already made itself felt in Kronecker's views and, it seems to me, finds its culmination in intuitionism".[7] Hilbert then states that "mathematics is a presuppositionless science. To found it I do not need God, as does Kronecker . . ."(p. 479).
[TBD: There is more discussion to be found in Grattan-Guinness re Kronecker, Cantor, the Crelle journal edited by Kronecker et. al., philosophies of Cantor and Kronecker.]
Russell the realist: Russell's Realism served him as an antidote to British Idealism,[8] with portions borrowed from European Rationalism and British empiricism.[9] To begin with, "Russell was a realist about two key issues: universals and material objects" (Russell 1912:xi). For Russell, tables are real things that exist independent of Russell the observer. Rationalism would contribute the notion of a priori knowledge,[10] while empiricism would contribute the role of experiential knowledge (induction from experience).[11] Russell would credit Kant with the idea of "a priori" knowledge, but he offers an objection to Kant he deems "fatal": "The facts [of the world] must always conform to logic and arithmetic. To say that logic and arithmetic are contributed by us does not account for this" (1912:87); Russell concludes that the a priori knowledge that we possess is "about things, and not merely about thoughts" (1912:89). And in this Russell's epistemology seems different from that of Dedekind's belief that "numbers are free creations of the human mind" (Dedekind 1887:31)[12]
But his epistemology about the innate (he prefers the word a priori when applied to logical principles, cf 1912:74) is intricate. He would strongly, unambiguously express support for the Platonic "universals" (cf 1912:91-118) and he would conclude that truth and falsity are "out there"; minds create beliefs and what makes a belief true is a fact, "and this fact does not (except in exceptional cases) involve the mind of the person who has the belief" (1912:130).
Where did Russell derive these epistemic notions? He tells us in the Preface to his 1903 Principles of Mathematics. Note that he asserts that the belief: "Emily is a rabbit" is non-existent, and yet the truth of this non-existent proposition is independent of any knowing mind; if Emily really is a rabbit, the fact of this truth exists whether or not Russell or any other mind is alive or dead, and the relation of Emily to rabbit-hood is "ultimate" :
- "On fundamental questions of philosophy, my position, in all its chief features, is derived from Mr G. E. Moore. I have accepted from him the non-existential nature of propositions (except such as happen to assert existence) and their independence of any knowing mind; also the pluralism which regards the world, both that of existents and that of entities, as composed of an infinite number of mutually independent entities, with relations which are ultimate, and not reducible to adjectives of their terms or of the whole which these compose. . . . The doctrines just mentioned are, in my opinion, quite indispensable to any even tolerably satisfactory philosophy of mathematics, as I hope the following pages will show. . . . Formally, my premisses are simply assumed; but the fact that they allow mathematics to be true, which most current philosophies do not, is surely a powerful argument in their favour." (Preface 1903:viii)
Russell and the paradox: In 1902 Russell discovered a "vicious circle" (the so-called Russell's paradox) in Frege's Begriffsschrift and he was determined not to repeat it in his 1903 Principles of Mathematics. In two Appendices that he tacked on at the last minute he devotes 28 pages to a detailed analysis of, first Frege's theory contrasted against his own, and secondly a fix for the paradox. Unfortunately he was not optimistic about the outcome:
- "In the case of classes, I must confess, I have failed to perceive any concept fulfilling the conditions requisite for the notion of class. And the contradiction discussed in Chapter x. proves that something is amiss, but what this is I have hitherto failed to discover. (Preface to Russell 1903:vi)"
"Fictionalism" and Russell's no-class theory: Gödel in his 1944 would disagree with the young Russell of 1903 ("[my premisses] allow mathematics to be true") but would probably agree with Russell's statement quoted above ("something is amiss"); Russell's theory had failed to arrive at a satisfactory foundation of mathematics: the result was "essentially negative; i.e. the classes and concepts introduced this way do not have all the properties required for the use of mathematics" (Gödel 1944:132).
How did Russell arrive in this situation? Gödel observes that Russell is a surprising "realist" with a twist: he cites Russell's 1919:169 "Logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology" (Gödel 1944:120). But he observes that "when he started on a concrete problem, the objects to be analyzed (e.g. the classes or propositions) soon for the most part turned into "logical fictions" . . . [meaning] only that we have no direct perception of them." (Gödel 1944:120)
In an observation pertinent to Russell's brand of logicism, Perry remarks that Russell went through three phases of realism -- extreme, moderate and constructive (Perry 1997:xxv). In 1903 he was in his extreme phase; by 1905 he would be in his moderate phase. In a few years he would "dispense with physical or material objects as basic bits of the furniture of the world. He would attempt to construct them out of sense-data" in his next book Our knowledge of the External World [1914]" (Perry 1997:xxvi).
These constructions in what Gödel 1944 would call "nominalistic constructivism . . . which might better be called fictionalism" derived from Russell's "more radical idea, the no-class theory" (p. 125):
- "according to which classes or concepts never exist as real objects, and sentences containing these terms are meaningful only as they can be interpreted as . . . a manner of speaking about other things" (p. 125)
- [wikipedia]
Tuesday 26 May 2015
Some Pics, from, Yesterday's,Cunard Birthday Party..
What, a Day!..thousands,of,people, down, by, the River, to, see, Cunard,Shipping lines, 'Three Queens'..Victoria,Mary, and,Elizabeth..
Monday 25 May 2015
Leon Bridges Performs "River" on the Chevy Music Showcase
I'll, be, down, by, the River, today...there's 7,000 visitors, expected...in, Liverpool...
Sunday 24 May 2015
WHAT'S ON? IN, LIVERPOOL..
When Paul McCartney brings his Out There world tour to Liverpool this week, it’ll be a homecoming that will start as soon as he lands at John Lennon Airport.
“I love that journey,” he says. "The thing I always do is give whoever I’m with the tour. I go along and I say ‘this is where we played our first gig’ and ‘that’s where John’s mum lived’ or ‘that’s the old Garston gas works’. We always go down Forthlin Road and I’ll see if there’s anyone outside. Last time there was a fella there saying I didn’t really live there. I wound the window down and said hello.
“Growing up in Speke I have so many memories of that area. All the old stories come out.
“I remember John and I going up to the airport on our bikes to watch the planes. It makes me smile to think that named the airport after him.”
MACCA PLAYS ON THURSDAY...ALREADY A SELL-OUT...
BUT, TO START PROCEEDINGS..THE FIRST,OF, CUNARD'S BEAUTIFUL QUEENS..ARRIVES,LATER ON, TODAY....
IT'S GOING TO BE A GREAT WEEK!..
Saturday 23 May 2015
The Clangers (Episode 1)
Furthermore, the very distinction between dualism and monism is again dualism: there is not a dualist Universe and a Zen one, or a world of logic and one of intuition, but merely two ways of looking at the same Tao. Zen does not oppose things, it unifies them.
Friday 22 May 2015
Wednesday 20 May 2015
Sunday 17 May 2015
Pareidoloa
Pareidoloa
Another way that external stimuli may be misperceived is termed pareidolia. A common example is when we "see faces" in clouds. The human brain tries to make sense of the world around it, when it is presented with a stimulus it will try and match it to something it has encountered before, again with respect to the person's beliefs and expectations.
Saturday 16 May 2015
Honey In Mythologies
Honey the food of the Greek Gods. “Ambrosia” a healthy milk and honey beverage also documented to be a drink enjoyed by Greek and Roman gods alike – as well as mortal men, and women.
Honey whether in the form of a well soaked desert cake or brewed up into a wonderful Ambrosia beverage one does not have to question how or why honey was an important part of mans mythologies. “The celestial Nectar”, the drink of Mount Olympus. The pure healthful nectar of the gods.
Wednesday 13 May 2015
Tuesday 12 May 2015
Monday 11 May 2015
Sunday 10 May 2015
TREE REX
Medieval Theories of Aesthetics
The term ‘aesthetics’ did not become prominent until the eighteenth century in Germany; however, this fact does not prevent principles of aesthetics from being present in the Middles Ages. Developments in the Middles Ages paved the way for the future development of aesthetics as a separate discipline. Building on notions from antiquity (most notably Plato and Aristotle) through Plotinus, the medieval thinkers extended previous concepts in new ways, making original contributions to the development of art and theories of beauty.
Certain topics, such as proportion, light, and symbolism, played important roles in medieval aesthetics, and they will be given prominence in this article. Proportion was particularly important for architecture, which is apparent in the cathedrals. Medieval thinkers were also interested in the concept of light: what it is and how it affects everything, especially color. Symbolism was based on the view that the creation revealed God; therefore, symbolic meaning could be communicated through artwork, in particular to those who are illiterate.
Three philosophers, St. Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and St. Thomas Aquinas, provided significant contributions to aesthetic theory during the Middle Ages. These three philosophers employed the two predominant approaches to philosophy in the Middle Ages. Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius were mainly influenced by Plato and Neoplatonism, while Thomas was mostly influenced by Aristotle.
WHAT WAS MARC BOLAN'S LAST HIT?..A TREE!. LOL!
Saturday 9 May 2015
What's on,in,Liverpool?..
http://www.visitliverpool.com/whats-on/cunard-lines-three-queens-meeting-p353341
THREE ,BIG,BEAUTIFUL, BABES,ARE, ON, THEIR, WAY!
THREE ,BIG,BEAUTIFUL, BABES,ARE, ON, THEIR, WAY!
Friday 8 May 2015
Thursday 7 May 2015
Wednesday 6 May 2015
INSIDE THE WHALE,by, GEORGE ORWELL..[WIKIPEDIA]
- Part 1
Orwell notes that a novel written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter of Paris seems an unlikely candidate to be a novel of outstanding value at the time, as its mental atmosphere belongs to the 1920s rather than the 1930s. Orwell is not concerned with the proliferation of 'unprintable words', but is more interested in the way Miller writes about the man in the street. He sees its value not by revealing what is strange, but what is familiar, and in this respect it has much in common with James Joyce inUlysses. He describes the prose as astonishing.
Orwell rejects another popular comparison with Céline's Journey to the End of the Night which is a book-with-a-purpose, but introduces a comparison with Walt Whitman whose literature is one of "acceptance" of life as it is rather than a struggle to change it. It is because he is passive to experience that Miller is able to get nearer to the 'ordinary man'. This is out of key with the times when writers had an active involvement in politics and is reflected in the difference between the literature of the Spanish Civil War written by "cocksure partisans telling you what to think" and that of the Great War literature written by "victims".
- Part 2
Orwell sets Tropic of Cancer against its literary context with a perusal of literary trends since the First World War. First there is A. E. Housman with nostalgic descriptions of the countryside and adolescent despair in A Shropshire Lad , which Orwell revered as a teenager. After Housman and the nature poets there was a new movement of the 1920s of unrelated writers with a similar outlook such as Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Lytton Strachey. These were noted by their pessimistic outlook and lack of interest in politics in the narrower sense. In the 1930s writing took on a serious purpose with the W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender group including people like Cecil Day-Lewis and Christopher Isherwood. Orwell saw a Boy scout leader type of prosetylising from this group which consisted of people from an almost identical public school–university–Bloomsbury background.
Orwell notes the left-leaning tendency of this group and its fascination with communism. Describing the communist as a Russian publicity agent, Orwell seeks an explanation for this. In addition to the common ground of anti-fascism he sees that after the debunking of Western civilisation and the disappearance of traditional middle class values and aspirations, people need something to believe in and Communism has replaced Catholicism as the escapist ideal. Orwell identifies another factor which is the softness and security of life in England against which the secret police and summary executions are too remote. He cites Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise for whom the key eventful period in his life was his public school education – "five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery". As an adjunct Orwell notes that what really frightened him about the Spanish Civil War was how these people adopted the mental attitudes of great war in support of their cause.
- Part 3
For Orwell, Miller is a writer who gets away from being a political animal. His passivity is illustrated by his declaration that Orwell's plan to go to Spain was "the act of an idiot". Miller used the analogy of Jonah and the Whale to apply to Anaïs Nin, and this is taken up by Orwell as describing the final unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility. Referring again to the great war Orwell notes the surviving readable works are those written from a passive negative angle and he highlights Prufrock by T. S. Eliot. Miller's is a human voice among bomb explosions. Orwell predicts the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture and suggests that any novel worth reading will have to follow the lines of Miller's work.
Tuesday 5 May 2015
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If I had my life to live over, I'd try to make more mistakes next time. I would relax. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I ...
