Bill sensei ED sama zen forum shabushabu. --- On Tue, 16/11/10, ED <[email protected]> wrote:
From: ED <[email protected]> Subject: !QRE: [Zen] Re: FW: Quote from St. Thomas Aquinas To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, 16 November, 2010, 12:12 AM Bill sensei Zen Forum students gasshos. --- In [email protected], <billsm...@...> wrote: > Lluis, I'm not saying that Westerners, in fact all humans that manifest a dualistic, discriminating mind, are tied to subject/object and verbs that describe action. That's a given. What I'm saying is that there are forms of English (and I suppose other languages) that are utterances free from subject/object/verb, that are not restricted by grammar. In the example phrases I used below: `Hungry!' and `Fire!', YOU are the one who is interjecting the dualism. If I yell `Fire!' or `Duck!' you will first just equate the sound to DANGER and react BEFORE you mentally reconstruct and augment the sound to `I have observed a fire and want to be sure you are aware of it.' Other non-exclamatory examples are in poetry, especially zen-inspired haikus such as Basho's famous haiku in which he attempted to communicate a DIRECT EXPERIENCE (Buddha Mind) he had. There are many attempts at translating this haiku, and the results show me whether or not the translator was translating with his/her discriminating mind or Buddha Mind: ORIGINAL JAPANESE Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto (Basho) DUALISTIC/DISCRIMINATING MIND TRANSLATION There once was a curious frog Who sat by a pond on a log And, to see what resulted, In the pond catapulted With a water-noise heard round the bog. (Alfred H. Marks) MIX OF DUALISTIC/DISCRIMINATING MIND AND BUDDHA MIND TRANSLATION Into the ancient pond A frog jumps Water's sound! (D.T. Suzuki) BUDDHA MIND TRANSLATION pond frog plop! (James Kirkup) Remember when I posted about what I describe as 'zen talk' and 'talking about zen'? The first translation above is 'talking about an experience'. The second is a mix, and the third is 'experience talk' - or 'zen talk'. The point is that language does have the ability to be used and to communicate non-dualistic (no subject/object/verb) experiences. Language evolved, not engineered. It is not appropriate to try to superimpose a logical structure on an evolved system. The grammatical rules that we associate with languages have been developed AFTER-THE-FACT, not CONCURRENT with the language. For example humans could speak and communicate very well before anyone ever decided to categorize words into nouns, verbs, subjects and objects. All this grammar is imposed upon language in an attempt to 'understand' language. 'Understand' always means 'impose a logical structure'. ...Bill!
