The Reading:
"Hyakujo, famous for his "no working, no eating" has appeared in Case 2... Hyakujo told Isan that true enlightenment is the same as illusion, remembering the same as forgetting, sages the same as fools."
"Hyakujo, famous for his "no working, no eating" has appeared in Case 2... Hyakujo told Isan that true enlightenment is the same as illusion, remembering the same as forgetting, sages the same as fools."
-Introduction to Case 40, Mumonkan, R.H. Blyth
Discussion:
What is the old fox up to now? Hyakujo is always teasing us with his Zen, with jokes that sound like riddles and riddles that sound like jokes. How odd it would be to hear these words from so many modern, not to mention historical, spiritual leaders. Saints are the same as sinners. Prophets are the same as fantasists. Wise men the same as idiots. Priests and holy men the same as charlatans.
It is one thing to hear this from non-believers, but from the holies themselves?
Yet if you doubt Hyakujo, then you throw out the fox with the bath water, and how can you when there was a funeral?
"The road up is the same as the road down"
ReplyDeleteI read this somewhere once and I think that it is trying to address the same principle here, that is, appearance of dichotomies are two extremes of the same idea. Being able to understand this you'd might be able to do some verbal algebra and find the opposite of the idea until there is nothing left to compare it to.
hot and cold - temperature
temperature and no temperature - temperature
(maybe everything breaks down to yes and no at the end of the day.)
It is not things meet at extremes, it is that the mind that imagines differences that don't exist. If you aren't attached to wisdom, then what are you, a sage or a fool?
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