The Teaching of Buddha - Begun 2009.10.16

My friend Nigel R. brought this book in for me to read — he thought I might be interested in it.

The Teaching of Buddha.

And it is a simple and direct transcription of Buddha's thoughts. I'm not sure I'll be reading this cover to cover — already I've been flipping in and out of it like a busy-bak'son. It is curious that I am perusing more Zennish stuff, these days. I used to read Zen books of various kinds, many years ago. And have a small, but reasonable collection of Zen books — although my favourite Zen book is by (Canadian) Tim Ward and is called What the Buddha Never Taught.

And in my purely random flipping, I stumbled into a great fushigi! On page 53, in the chapter called 'The Theory of Mind-only and the Real State of Things,' I read:

Inherently there are no distinctions between the process of life and the process of destruction; people make a discrimination and call one birth and the other death. In action there is no discrimination between right and wrong, but people make a distinction for their own convenience. (My emphasis.)

What makes this a fushigi is how it ties in what I was beginning to edit in preparation for publication into my other blog, and into Scribd. Last night I was writing an introduction to two one act plays. The first, Why are you Truthful? was written by Raymond Smullyan and published in his excellent book

5000 BC and Other Philosophical Fantasies.

The other was written by me, and is called Why are you False? I wrote it as an exercise in philosophy, specifically the philosophy of the equivalency of 'truthfulness' and 'falsehood' if, in fact, 'there is no discrimination between right and wrong'. At the time I wrote it I wasn't inspired by Zen thought, per se, but by Taoist thought and the importance of being who you are: if you are a liar, and you are completely true to that, is that different than being truthful and who you are? In other words, is it better to be a truthful liar than a false truth teller? (I will be blogging these plays after I've completed the intro and possible edits.)

Hence, Nigel's book supplied me with a great fushigi.