What they came to know

Ta-Wan

It is often amazing what apparently less advanced people knew. Now I mean the technologically less advanced of say 5,000 years ago and less and it is up to you if you believe that we had previous technological highs or not. It seems true that our minds have been just as able for a couple of hundred thousand years or more, enough certainly to say that anything passed down to us was done by equally able, equally fallible, but basically by folks like us. The difference being our much larger population, ability to share ideas and language for describing our ideas.

Sometimes I wonder if the apparent foresight of past masters only arose as a relic of translation. Translators are naturally strong when it comes to language, so in translating an idea strange to us, they can easily paint it in our language in a way that when we read it, we sit in awe of past wisdom. Then though you have the translators who openly tell us that they feel the original message cannot be painted in our language in the same original saturation and depth of colour. Sanskrit would be a good example.

So then again another example comes forward to make me think of this all over again. The Buddha did not write and spoke a fairly simple language. Over the years his words were added to and translated over and over, but we feel that the core message came through. One key message, that of causality, is one I have found to be in contrast with a sense of oneness that he also taught, Taoism speaks of and other nondual teachings also. Cause and effect always seems open to an infinite regress and so becomes meaningless it seems.

There I was last night watching a lecture at the cutting edge of science, a lecture which, as a sub heading, was looking for complete unification and oneness in science to date -- and they concluded that causality is real and the basic language of the universe! Well done Buddha for sitting under a tree and getting that!

The theory is Causal Set Theory by, amongst others a protégé of Stephen Hawking, and it says, amongst other things, that space is a quantized thing and that causality is the basic language of the universe. It goes on to say that causality cannot operate completely over the vast distances of the universe but.. go Buddha!

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