[Skybird]

Originally Posted by August

Well either you respect other peoples personal property and right to worship God as they see fit or you do not. Apparently you and your book burning hero do not and calling me stupid foreign names isn't going to change or justify that.


You're like every other Zealot i've ever met. So convinced that your beliefs are the only "correct" beliefs possible that you're willing to justify just about anything. The truth of the matter is you do not have, and never will have, the right to tell others what they may or may not believe in.

Man, komm mal wieder auf den Teppich. It was a Chinese Buddhist Chan monastery where they had scrolls with Chinese Buddhist teachings written by monks like those sitting in such monasteries - and you make it a civil rights case, basing on a superpedantic bean-counting thinking separated from the events by 12 hundred years. It was an educational demonstration and/or a display of Hui Neng's enlightenment in the meaning that he had broken through to an understanding of how limited all word-making necessarily always is. And you make it a bureaucratic formality of today's standards.

That is hilarious!

Entering someones place of worship and destroying religious texts because you don't believe in what they say is nothing more than criminal vandalism. A hate crime on par with Islamists destroying Buddhist statues or burning the Library at Alexandria. I don't care if that's not what Hui Neng was about. As far as i'm concerned such behavior invalidates anything else this guy has to say.

He did not enter that palce of worship, because he already lived there, the story goes. He was a helper in the kitchen, was somewhat too unadapted, nevertheless the abbot was aware of his potential and gave him permission to stay, and gave him separate teaching lessons. When he had Satori, he stormed out of the abbot's room and into the library. And no, the abbot was not angry. He confirmed his enligthenment instead.

And you think it was a culture clash, eh? Another Zen story given for educational illustration goes like this. The abbot sits on a small path at a mneadow, when a working monk comes along with a wheelbarrow. "Please, master, move your feet slightly to the side, so that I have room to pass", he asked. The abbot said "What rests, one should lket rest". The monk replied "And what rolls one should let roll", and rolled the wheelbarrow right over the abbot's feet. As far as I recall, the abbot on that day declared this moink to have fpound enlightenment. - You probably only see the act of physical assault in this, and form a law case of it.

I do not expect somebody who knows nothing about Zen to have an immediate understanding of why so much appears as absurd and counterintuitve in Zen and its tradition. You cannot understand that from all start on if it is all new to you. But what leaves me stunned is the narrow mind that tries to reduce it to materialistic acts of bureaucratic, formal meaning exslcusively. You see, all other people I told these stories asked "I do not understand, what is it aboiut, why did he do it, isn'ÄT that absdurd?" You file a comlaint at the court and think that is all about it. that illustrates an extremely minimilastic and reductionistic mindset, I would say, probably one that cannot even imagine the chance that something could be any different than what that mind already has decidced to take as the only possible option for defining how things can be - it'S own interpretation, that is.

Seen that way, your reaction is truly unique.

But what appears as absurd and illogical in Zen, has only this as a goal: to break apart right this thinking pattern, to push the student beyond the limits of right this kind of thinking that makes him believe that his ego is the master of the world. Breaking through the narrow, limited scope of the dualistic and polarising ordinary mindset that is the cause of all the conflicts we get ourselves entangled in. To give up judging, and for a start leave it to witnessing. It is a difference whether you say: "I don't like that woman in the street, that hilarious dress she wears, isn'T it impossible! Somebody really should have a qword with her about it", or whether you say "I see that women over there, she is dressed in that dress that really catches attention because of X, Y, and Z, and now she is heading for the busstop." - The first already emotionally rants, and reacts by habit without n ot being aware that it is habit controlling your reaction, and you start with already judging. The latter is just a sober witness report. Who of the two illustrates the mindset that is more free, independent, autonomous and sober? Which of thre two has the greater chance to rersult in you not dpoing harm to the overall situation, and if you act in the the context of this situation, has you acting on the basis ob fairtness and objectivity? Are you more free if you are controlled by habits that you leave unquestioned, and that you are not aware of, or by being reflective about yourself?

I offer no beliefs, although you have chosen with iron determination to claim the opposite, and by that distort reality for you do not want to deal with what I indeed really say. I do not even explkain the content of any such belief of my own that you claim I hold. All I do is two things: I ask questions on the nature of mental processes and our assumntpions about things, and I try to explain the working mode, the m,odus operandi, by which I am aware I construct the reality I prefer to live in. A working method, and the result of a working process, are two totally different things.

You can claim as often as you want that I believe this or that, and that I am a believer of "my things". Endless repetition as the only argument coming fro m you, does not makje a false statement of yours any less wrong. As I see it, what I tried to desribe is too alien from what you are used to, and it is so new and different from what you are used to take for the common way that you simply rtefuse to acept that it nevertheless does exist. Your modus operandi in other words is this: "It should not be so it cannot be, and thus I cut of some here, and add some things there, until it fits the schemes I am used to. Afterwards, I judge the result (that is my result and not the original source) by the standards I am used to."

A total confusion. And form of fanatism that is extremely resistent to any form of influencing it, and that labels any act of defence against it as an aggression by the victim.

Scripture believers. Pffft. They often have burned infidels. I prefer to burn instead said scriptures that makes them that insane. In Cairo and Libya, a mob of blind hysterics running on lower instincts that got set aflame again, have stormed US diplomatic missions, a US envoy or ambassador was murdered. Over scripture.