Padmasambhava's Initiation/East Asia

[Guest guest]

, Dharma <deva@L...> wrote:

> Hi Terry,

<Snip>

 

> It seems to me that there is a tendency of the (East) Indian

mind/brain,

> whether from nature or nurture, to make lists of everything... four

of

> this, seven of that, twelve of something else... My mother and I

found the

> Kama Sutra hysterically funny because of this list-making kind of

> thinking... three kinds of men, 67 (?) things an accomplished woman

knows,

> so many kinds of love bites that can be used, so many different

sounds

> uttered in sex at the appropriate moments, etc. Mom kept trying to

make

> the "sound of the partridge" and cracking up completely. ))

 

Just an observation on this. According to a famous sinologist, the

Chinese were pragmatic to a fault, excellent record keepers, and

accurate in their observations of phenomena, but did not extrapolate

from their observations to come up with "theories". This is not

entirely true, as they did have some theories, such as five-element

theory, yin and yang, and trigrams of the I Ching, but westerners

would have considered these things as superstition, not theory. So

perhaps something important here: extrapolation on the basis of

observation is clearly a mental function, and one not highly regarded

in China. Is this why mind is discounted in Chan/Zen? Bye for now.

Terry.

[Guest guest]

Hi Terry,

>> It seems to me that there is a tendency of the (East) Indian

>mind/brain,

>> whether from nature or nurture, to make lists of everything... four

>of

>> this, seven of that, twelve of something else... My mother and I

>snip<

>Just an observation on this. According to a famous sinologist, the

>Chinese were pragmatic to a fault, excellent record keepers, and

>accurate in their observations of phenomena, but did not extrapolate

>from their observations to come up with "theories". This is not

>entirely true, as they did have some theories, such as five-element

>theory, yin and yang, and trigrams of the I Ching, but westerners

>would have considered these things as superstition, not theory. So

>perhaps something important here: extrapolation on the basis of

>observation is clearly a mental function, and one not highly regarded

>in China.

 

Hmm... sitting here mulling it over...

 

What do I know about western thinking, which a few hundred years back,

means European thinking? Well, we do know that the structure of the

languages seems to be important for the nature of our thinking. The man

who studied Hopi (can't come up with his name) told us that.

 

Our language is structured into subject and predicate... noun and verb...

a doer and the action. That seems only natural, but it ain't necessarily

so... the contrast with Hopi tells us that. It's an agglutinative

language... no subject and predicate... just a word that grows with

things stuck on before and aft until you have a long word that's a complete

thought. And the Hopi studier (what IS his name?) thought that this has a

lot to do with the Hopi being basically cooperative, and in contrast us

being competitive.

 

Indian thinking... Sanskrit is an Indo-European language... subject and

predicate, as far as I know. But there seem to be an abundance of

languages in use in India now, and I don't know enough about them to draw

any conclusions.

 

I don't know much about the Chinese language... but I had a Chinese

student once who told me something interesting. We had pulled in the 100

worst writers in the freshman class (at an American university) for

tutorial work in very small classes. This young man's problem was with

tenses... at first I assumed that he just didn't know English very well

and needed to study the verb forms. He told me that he knew all the verb

forms... he had memorized them all. He just didn't understand them...

had no idea of what all those different forms meant, when to use them.

 

He said the reason was that Chinese has no tenses. No verb forms for past,

present, and future, and all the variations... Just a verb, and for past

or future you use words like "yesterday" and "tomorrow." I go... I go

yesterday... I go tomorrow. No wonder he couldn't figure out how to use

our verb forms!

 

Do you think this might have something to do with not extrapolating from

observed facts?

>Is this why mind is discounted in Chan/Zen?

 

Don't know... I haven't studied with a Zen Master. What I've thought is

that it's a perfectly good teaching system, and the main difference is that

in Zen you go straight for the ultimate goal... that's what's important,

and everything else that might happen is a distraction, an impediment. So

thinking... any use of the mind... would be an impediment. Hence the

value of the koan... no logical thinking, just a sheer contradiction, an

impossibility to look at in meditation... and maybe the usual structures

of the mind will slip a little... maybe you'll fall through a crack in the

mind. )

 

Love,

Dharma