Category: meditation
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‘Yet here I am in my wretchedness’
The end of Chapter 6 of Chuang Tsu’s Inner Chapters is startling. It has been raining for 10 days, and one friend, Tsu Ysu, believes his friend Tsu Sang to be in a bad way. When he arrives at Tsu Sang’s house, he hears a lamentation. ‘O Mother! O Father! Is it heaven, or is it man?’
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Yen Hui’s progress
We read in The Inner Chapters of Yen Hui’s progress. He had given up ‘doing good and being right,’ but Confucius tells him this is ‘not quite enough.’ He goes away and returns. He had given up ‘ceremony and music,’ which is also good but ‘not quite enough.’ Sometime later, he comes back to Confucius, relating that ‘I…
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‘Knowing enough to stop when one does not know is perfection’
Chuang Tsu observes, ‘Knowing enough to stop when one does not know is perfection.’ I welcome Chuang Tsu’s thoughts, his humor and his lightness. His measure and delight. Kant and Locke wrote of knowing one’s limits, but Kant said nothing of stopping and would have been shocked by Chuang Tsu’s epigrammatic ending: that stopping when…
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Arguing is useless
In Chapter 2 of the Inner Chapters, Chuang Tsu says, ‘Words that argue miss the point.’ Arguing is useless, since there is no sense in wanting to be right and no change of heart in being proven wrong. Arguing makes a mockery of dispassion: niceties turned into traps in order to be sprung upon unprepared opponents.…
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Learning from Zen: Withdrawing from a way of thinking
‘Brushing off thoughts which arise is like washing off blood with blood. We remain impure because of being washed in blood….’ –Bankei, Diaho Shogen Kokushi Hogo, quoted in Alan Watts, The Way of Zen ‘The new DSM would have everything right were it to forget such words as ‘diagnose’ and ‘treat’.’ –Zen Master One learns from a…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 