Friday, November 11, 2011

The Tao that can be Taoed

The apple that can be told does not taste of apple.
by Ta-Wan


Here's to the pointless activity of talking about Tao! We all love to do it.

No apple is the same, taste, texture, skin, form - We call them all by the same name though, apple.

No experience, no person, no act is ever the same. Even the supposedly rigid things in our lives like computer programs, clocks and machines don't repeat actions perfectly over and again.
"Windows error: it seems you were in the middle of something important. Whatever it was, it's gone and there is no going back. Click OK to lose all of your work and never see it again. OK."
We are determined that words have solid unchanging meanings, we label things, even processes, as if they were perfectly repeatable and only ever the same.

Your actual experience though is of an ever changing reality.

Are you a process or a thing?

The sun is seen as and named as a thing. On brief inspection though the raging furnace it is is seen to be a rapidly altering process. There is no difference between a lump of concrete or rock and the raging sun apart from relative speed of process.

Is summer a thing or process, is a storm a thing or process, is the battle between cobra and mongoose a thing or process, is your heart a thing or process, are you a thing or process?

It's all an ongoing flux with no fixed form. A process, indefinable. Not the name.

You can check out Ta-Wan's other musings here.

2 comments:

  1. I think this is why certain Chinese masters paint nothing but bamboo. For years and years.

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  2. Whether it be a "thing" or a "process" seems, to me, to be subordinate to the very practical business of NAMING things. Maybe the sun and the concrete are, um, "the same" (?), but I would like to know when "the sun" is rising, whereas I do not care when the... concrete... rises. Because language. No?

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