Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Real Life Tao - The Sage and the Buddha

I think most people are familiar with the line from the Zen koan, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." It relays much the same message as the first line of the Tao Te Ching: "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao."

Basically, what I believe these two similar passages are saying is that whatever you think heaven, nirvana, enlightenment or the Way is, it isn't. We continually shield our vision from what is by creating a slew of preconceived notions. Consequently, our prejudices and desires often adulterate what we experience.

Rather than soaking in the waters of essential nature, we run through them like a child runs through a sprinkler. Little droplets of supreme virtue fall upon us, but we too often misunderstand these little droplets because we can't comprehend the whole stream! Yet, there seems to be lots of people who gather up sundry droplets and package them in their own unique ways and then declare that they hold the whole river in their hands!

In thinking about the koan in paragraph one, it could be said this way from a Taoist perspective: If you meet a self-described Sage on the road, ignore him! Any person you meet who believes that they are, in a fact, a sage is not. If that person genuinely was a sage, they would be the last person in the world to say it.

Attaining sagacity is not something any of us can do by placing check marks next to points on a list. In fact, if you or I even make such a list, this act in and of itself will outright guarantee that wisdom and insight will forever evade us. It is impossible to set out to become a sage because the act of trying undoes the whole process!

It should be noted that, while modern day Taoists consider Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu to be sages, neither of them ever made this declaration. They wrote of people who came before them. While both are great teachers, I assume the lives they led were much like ours. Two more bumpkins stumbling down the road.

2 comments:

  1. Your viewpoint reminds me of another maxim.

    "Those who talk do not know, those who know do not talk"

    Not that it should be taken literally that one who imparts wisdom shouldn't, but rather, in this context, the wise man doesn't boast that it's "his" wisdom.

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  2. Then again: it seems reasonable to assume that a sage - being a sage - would know what he was.
    Being a sage, he might be able to see the general lack of sagacity in others.
    To come right out and say: "now look here: I am a sage..." might be an indication of ego. But so what?
    There are some pretty fake sages out there, but each one has a definite interest in sagacity.
    Maybe it is not really necessary to have hard-and-fast rules for sage-recognition.
    Usually it is quite evident who is and who is not.
    In addition: I have a suspicion that no sage is a sage all the time.
    Like the junkie, the thief, the wife-beater: they may be those things, but they are many other things too.

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