Hi, 118 -
Quality does not have an antonym.
How about the Buddhist "Dukkha"?
I don't know if the issue has been run into the ground, but Bob's writing
about motorcycles running well or not so well brings to my mind. Those
moralistic English translators saying "Life is suffering" were way out of it
and have done a lot of mischief. Alan Watts' writing first called it to my
attention, but Wikipedia has it too:
The ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India were a
nomadic, horse- and cattle-breeding people who travelled in horse- or
ox-drawn vehicles. Su and dus are prefixes indicating
good or bad. The word kha, in later Sanskrit meaning "sky," "ether," or
"space," was originally the word for "hole," particularly an axle hole of
one of the Aryan's vehicles. Thus sukha … meant,
originally, "having a good axle hole," while duhkha meant "having a poor
axle hole," leading to discomfort.
The way I like to translate the Noble Truth is "Sometimes, life gets out of
joint." I don’t get along with American Buddhists so well - they get so
self-denying. I remember walking around Berkeley and seeing so many
anxious-looking ladies in scratchy-looking cotton skirts, very "simple
living" and not so happy, with their little eyeglasses and wanting to be so
pure. America gets so heady about its Buddhism. It seems to bring out a
latent Puritanism. Bah.
As Aldus Huxley famously said on his deathbed while tripping on acid: "I
have seen the way things appear to be, now I will see how they truly are".
What did he think he had been seeing??
Here we have a good example of the world of appearances being converted to
the world of essence.
They ain't separate. It's our silliness to think they are.
MRB
http://www.fuguewriter.com
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