Gassho and good morning to all!
Just a revelation I had a few years back that I continue to find useful in almost all of my Buddhist, and other, studies.
It actually comes from a Taoist source. The very first verse of the Tao in fact, among the various translations I like this one:
"The Tao that can be spoken of is not the enduring and
unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and
unchanging name."
I wracked my brain on it for quite a while, just trying to figure out what it meant, it wasn't until I spent five semesters learning German, spent a semester on French, and two non-stop vocational years of Arabic, that I realized that, for me, this verse is linguistic in nature.
It speaks not of one thing, but of all things. The name in question is just a word, any word, every word. A word is nothing more than a name that we call something. But the problem is it's more than just that; it's context, prejudice, symbolism, and all these things and all these judgments and all these little mental sticky notes we attribute to absolutely everything to cover up the reality of what it truly is! And finally someone realized that no matter how true our judgments are, they're all lies! Every truth a lie, and within every lie a truth! All good became bad, all bad became good, because all these labels are just sticky gunk built up on the shining light bulb of reality from the day we were born!
"Think with the mind you had before you were born," if someone knows the author of this quote please tell me.
Suddenly, every religion became the same, from Catholicism to Atheism to Voodoo to Buddhism to the religions of the past long forgotten to the religions of the future yet undiscovered to every idea and thought and philosophy, anything that ever used a human word of any language suddenly became useless, a divine useless that was both completely wrong and eternally true.
After this, I saw Buddha in the Bible, the Quran, the Wiccan Books of Shadows, the Math textbook, the Sociology textbook, the little sticky notes my wife left on the fridge for me, every message or kind gesture, every Christian prayer, everything man has ever used to communicate ever or will ever use forever! I saw Buddhist teachings in everything, or, more often, I didn't see it but knew it was there, somewhere, because every lie has some nature in reality and every truth has some way to be misconceived...
So the only way to see reality was to set it all aside, to step back, to realize that nothing will ever be perfect, not even the Dharma, but that everything is also perfect, as it is, as it should be, just like the Dharma.
Or something like that, I'm no teacher, no master, I can barely "find time" to sit daily if I'm able to at all. But I wanted to share, and also I wanted to ask...
What're y'all's favorite (non-)Buddhist lessons you've picked up?
Thank you for reading, thank you for your time,
Gassho
Dylan
Sat Today
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Originally Posted by Dylan
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... A raindrop in an ocean, more to come. Thank you.
