shen and Shen

[Guest guest]

Lonny, when you talk about shen and Shen are you expicitedly saying Shi Shen and

Yuan Shen? Would this be what others say as small and big shen and yin and yang

shen?

 

Sorry, I haven't been able to look through your books for this.

 

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I am especially interested in these lines, I hope they come through. They refer

to shi shen, zhen shen - which I assume is a description, not a " technical "

category of another shen -and yuan shen.

 

Doug

[Guest guest]

Hi David,

 

 

I'm going to respond largely from memory here. Shishen, is used by Liu Yi

Ming to refer to the conditioned mind as a faculty of distinguishing between

things-in other words, it refers to separative consciousness or what might be

called ego.

 

From Nourishing Destiny, P. 94 (Available in The Inner Teachings of Daoism by

Cleary):

 

" When yin and yang divide, the five elements become disordered

(luan). The five elements, metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, represent the

five qi.18 The five elements of early heaven create each other following the

sheng cycle. These five elements fuse to form a unified qi. From them issue

forth the five virtues (de) of benevolence, righteousness,propriety, wisdom, and

integrity. [The five elements] of later heaven overcome [ke] one another

following the [ke] cycle. This manifests as the five rebels of joy, anger,

grief, happiness, and desire.

 

When the five elements are united, the five virtues are present and

yin and yang form a chaotic unity. Once the five elements divide, the

distinguishing spirit (shishen) gradually arises, and the encrustation

of the senses gradually takes place; truth flees and the false becomes

established. Now, even the state of the child is lost. "

 

In the Method of Holding the Three Ones (Poul Anderson) Ben Ming Yuan Shen = the

Primordial spirits of fundamental

destiny. The ascended spirits who live in the center of the Big

Dipper and assign a destiny to each individual commensurate with

personal merit at the moment of conception.

 

In an animistic sense we could call the yuan shen the macrocosmic shen. The

notion is that, at conception, light is invested within us by heaven, the moon,

the stars, and the sun. Of course the light from these three luminaries figures

prominently in the older character for shen (See Weiger). The moon the stars and

sun are the heavenly counterparts of the jing, qi, and shen in the microcosm. At

any rate, the " primordial spirits of fundamental destiny " live in the Big

Dipper, the " Central Administration of Human Destiny (ming4) " and assign a

destiny as light to each person at conception. At death, the hun exits GV-20 and

returns to report on the degree to which we fulfilled our contract (the triangle

in the character ming) and followed our " orders " ming4 to fulfill destiny

(ming4). If we become enlightened (ming: Sun and moon), then only light returns

and we are immortal having joined that which lives forever-light.

 

The thing is, I suspect that this wasn't metaphor but that they literally

believed this. In reality, Shen, large " S " is that shining glory beyond the mind

pointed to by Hur Jun " wherein there is nothing to do but praise its existence. "

It's consciousness, a light that sees only itself and doesn't recognize us (shen

small " s " ). It's not hard to see how earlier forms of animistic or absolutist

consciousness would have created such stories in the face of nondual experience.

 

So yes, I would agree that shishen refers to shen, small " s " and

yuanshen to Shen, large " S " . But we should make the discernment that it's really

the conditioned state of shen, small " s " that leads to separative consciousness.

Having a mind that can discriminate and help us locate in time and space is a

good thing. But it's only looking through the eyes of Shen, large " S " , that can

afford us an objective, sane, and clear view of ourselves and our experience to

see through the illusion of the conditioned mind (shen, small s).

 

That's why I say that Shen/Spirit contextualizes the medicine. If we take away

the myth and superstition we can say that there is only One light and that there

is an evolutionarily evolved mechanism in the nervous system, and of mind (ego),

that creates the illusion of separation. This illusion can be seen through

though habits persist. The goal is to set the will (zhi) single mindedly on

liberation (a notion present throughout Confucian writings) and to shift

identification from the mechanism to that one light.....then the shen and the

Shen may become one.

[Guest guest]

David,

 

 

It might be helpful to compare the characters shishen with Huntun.

Shishen, as I said, refers to the distinguishing faculty of the mind conditioned

by ego to see every " thing " as separate. Huntun (hun water radical, tun Weiger

79) is the name of the primordial, undifferentiated nature of dao in Zhuangzi:

 

The emperor of the South Sea was called Shu [brief], the emperor of

the North Sea was called Hu [sudden], and the emperor of the central

region was called Huntun [Chaos]. Shu and Hu from time to time

came together for a meeting in the territory of Huntun, and Huntun

treated them very generously. Shu and Hu discussed how they could

repay his kindness. " All men, " they said, " have seven openings so

they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Huntun alone doesn't have

any. Let's try boring him some! " Every day they bored another hole,

and on the seventh day, Huntun died.

 

The huntun myth and it's implications for early Daoism were well covered in

Girardot, " Myth and Meaning in Early Daoism " .

 

Hun refers to rushing water that is mixed and chaotic beyond the grasp of the

mind. It refers to a primordial state in which all " things " are potential and

interpenetrated (tong) to the point that there is only unity, a unity that the

mind cannot understand and thus causes confusion (hun). Tun pictures a sprout

breaking through the earth which might be taken to signify the implicit

potential of emptiness to give rise to becoming.

 

 

 

This " chaos " may be perceived in meditation when we close the 7 holes in

our head and renounce all relationship to experience (The 7 holes correspond to

the 7 sensory orifices whose counterpart exists as the light of heaven contained

in the 7 stars of the big dipper, the origin of destiny. The stars are named

after the 12 paired meridians taiyin, shaoyang etc. with the central star being

tianshu-St-25).

 

The sensory orifices, the outer manifestation of the heart orifice, become

conditioned by the illusion of separation both by weather (external

circumstances/life experience), and excessive attention on internal emotions

that obscure the heart. Hence shishen or " discriminatory awareness " arises (I

think this was Cleary's translation which is excellent) to carve the oneness

into apparent separation.

 

I find it always helps to examine such terms in a very large context and that

understanding the cultural myths, spiritual, cosmological, and physiological

perspectives, always helps to appreciate the depth of any given term when

reading.