Kai, I don’t recall a similar thread, but I might have missed it. I was very busy working about 6 months ago and was distracted to the point of not keeping up with all the postings on Yahoo! Zen Forum.
If you want to thank someone for resurrecting this topic, thank Philomonk (Philosopher-Monk?). He’s yet to respond to my posting, but I invite him to also respond to this one. Before I start I want to make it very clear that Joshu did indeed completely respond to ALL questions about Buddha Nature in his laser reply ‘Mu!’. All of these things we’re discussing are just intellectual masturbation, rhetorical Sudoku – based entirely on manufactured human concepts, much like dreams or the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. They are all fantasies, little more than dreams. They really have nothing to do at all with Buddha Nature and in many cases only serve mislead. They are overflowing tea in your teacup. Now that I’ve warned you that the cakes I’m about to offer are dusty, tasteless and may make you sick (an Al analogy), I’ll serve you up a generous portion of them. Eat them at your peril. The phrase we’re trying to analyze is ‘it depends on YOU (the observer) if a being has Buddha Nature or not’. The first thing that jumps out at me in this phrase are the terms ‘you’, ‘observer’ and ‘being’. They are support a dualistic view of reality. If there is a ‘you’, then there is a ‘not-you’. If there is an ‘observer’, then there is an object, something that is separate from the observer that is being observed. ‘Being’ also seems to refer to some ‘other being’, perhaps the object being observed by the observer, which again supports a dualistic view. As already discussed, ‘Buddha Nature’ is a manufactured human concept, an illusion. So, what I interpret this phrase to mean is: If you are operating in a dualistic mode then there is a ‘you’ separate from everything else, like other ‘beings’. This ‘you’ creates concepts, like ‘Buddha Nature’. Since it is ‘you’ that creates this concept, it is also entirely up to ‘you’ to assign the existence of this concept in an ‘other being’. So I guess the statement is correct in its own context. But now that you’ve read all this intellectual gibberish and the dusty cakes sit heavy in your stomach, doesn’t Joshu’s ‘Mu!’ seem much more elegant and to the point? …Bill! From: Zen_Forum@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 8:28 PM To: Zen_Forum@yahoogroups.com Subject: [Zen] Buddha Nature (was: Practice, Psychosis and the Human) Bill, Thank you for taking up this topic again. I remember we had a similar thread some time (half a year?) ago. I tried to look it up the other day but did not find it any more. There was one post the author of which wrote that it depended on you (the observer) if a being had the Buddha nature or not. This surprised me very much and I would be thankful for some clarification. Gasshoo / Heshou, Kai
