Originally Posted by ChrisA
Well, sure! But I think that we're teasing out a slightly different point here.
Increasingly, it's my sense that many teachers in the post-WWII West got tired of people going on about wanting to reach Nirvana, and therefore created dharma talks that responded to those attempts at grasping. Since their students wanted to "break on through to the other side" and then stay there, they emphasized that "the other side" was just as impermanent as anything else, and not a new address across the tracks in paradise.
As such, the dharma talks to which I'm referring sought to use the language, labels, differentiation, and so on to respond to the needs of their students. These "intentional mistakes" seem to me to be a perfectly legitimate dharma raft on which one could travel a ways, and, like any raft, you'd want to dispense with it after it had served its purpose, if (inevitably) imperfectly.
I daresay that Hagen, Katagiri, or Suzuki, even if they agreed with my characterizations of their pedagogy, would never say or encourage anyone to say, "I'm this. I'm that. I'm both. I'm neither, I'm both both and neither" as definitive declarations of Truth. However, they all signed their names as Hagen, Katagiri, and Suzuki -- labels, all, just like "you," friends," and "Saijun," Saijun. ;)
Gassho for this discussion!