THE BIG PICTURE

You cannot have solid without space, day without night, life without death. Such opposites only APPEAR to be opposites when in fact they are two aspects of one reality. They are two side of the same coin. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c.a. 535-475 B.C.) used the analogy "the road down and the road up are the same road."

These opposites arise mutually, called the coincidence of opposites, so that you cannot have one without the other. Taoism states that within every opposite lies its counterpart. In the yin-yang symbol there is a dot of yin in yang, and a dot of yang in yin. Within sickness lies health and within health lies sickness. This, according to Taoism, is because all opposites are manifestations of the single Tao and are therefore not independent from one another.

Advaita Vedanta speaks of the seeming duality of things in terms of the soul, or Atman, and the eternal, or Brahman. When a person tries to know Brahman through his objective mind, Brahman appears to be separate from the individual. In reality, there is no difference between Brahman and Atman. They are the same thing. Liberation lies in coming to know the reality of this non-difference
(a-dvaita, "non-duality").

Buddhism addresses this issue as well but regarding Subject and Object generally. This is stated by the Buddha in verses such as “In seeing, there is just seeing. No seer and nothing seen. In hearing, there is just hearing. No hearer and nothing heard.” Non-Duality in Buddhism does not constitute merging with a supreme Brahman as in Vedanta, but in realising that the duality of a self/subject/agent/watcher/doer in relation to the object/world is an illusion.

IT WILL PASS

One can never set foot in the same river twice. It is not the same river the second time. Existence is changing ever changing. Since all is transient this way, all is unreliable. This is called "annica" in Buddhism, the First Dharma Seal. When a prince asked his jeweler to create something for him that would carry him through the good times as well as the bad, the jeweler made him a ring inscribed with the words "It will pass."

This impermanence results in frustration, hence suffering. Life is a moving target which is moving every which way and at every possible speed. Meanwhile the well-intentioned shooter, the individual in the world, is also moving every which way and at every possible speed but not always in the same direction and at same speed as the target. Everyone and everything is in this state of hit-and-miss.

Buddhism is not the only place where this observation is found. In western philosophy, Heraclitus (c.a. 535-475 B.C.) spoke of "flux." Nothing possesses the permanency of "being," he said. All is in a state of becoming, i.e. of becoming something else. Nothing is permanent except change, he said. In the same way, the person reading this essay is not the same person who will finish it. Thomas Merton, the 20th century American Catholic writer, when speaking of his early autobiography THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, said that it was somebody else who wrote it, a different Thomas Merton.

"Mindfulness" in Buddhism is being aware that transience is the condition of this existence, which allows us to feel compassion not only toward all other human beings but toward all other living things, which don't have it easy either.

COMMON DENOMINATOR

Life is not all suffering, but largely it is suffering. According to Buddhist psychology, every moment of life when happiness and inner peace are absent is a moment of suffering. When we are rushing, impatient, irritated, frustrated, anxious, angry, fearful, bored, sad, or jealous, when we are filled with desire for something we want that we don’t have, or feel aversion for something we do have that we don’t want, we are suffering. When we are reliving a painful experience from our past or imagining a future one, we are suffering. Nothing on this planet is free of it. Even long-time Buddhists who endeavor to not suffer still do so, because one cannot eliminate all of his or her sources of suffering.

To ease our pain we seek out what pleasures we can find here and there, food, sex, alcohol, adventure. The trouble is, we adapt to these to where we need more and more of them to get the same effect. The same effect, however, is not the same effect.

The solution is to have nothing and to want nothing. Successfully cultivating a mind set such as this, however, can take a lifetime, by which time it is too late.

SPEAKING ABOUT SPEAKING ABOUT IT

He who says he knows the Tao does not know it. He who knows the Tao does not say so. There is a human experience that defies communication, where attempting to speak about it is taboo or at the very least is discouraged. This is because it ends in mumbo-jumbo. Talking about it is successful only when it is done obliquely. For instance, it cannot be said what the Tao is, only what it is like. The Tao is like gravity.

Vedantists have the same difficulty when it comes to the Brahman, which they term the "Ground of All Being." The "Ground of All Being" is insufficient, though, because it belittles the immensity of the Brahman. Ultimately Vedantists sum up the Brahman with the phrase "neti, neti" (not this, not that).

Buddhists, by contrast, are spared this. They have no place for the "supernatural," as argued by the Buddha in his early sermon On the Nonexistence of the Soul. Agnostics is how Buddhists are described generally, because their concern is human suffering here and now and how it can be eliminated, rather than the existence of anything supreme.

Zen Buddhism is a different kettle of fish. A Zen master will insist that there is not even a Way, that he or she has nothing to teach. What follows then is a tug of war between the student and the master, the former still seeking Truth, the latter still shrugging that there is no Truth, until finally the intellect and will of the student collapses. This leaves only consciousness, which like the Tao and the Brahman is also beyond communication.

Yet there is a larger issue here: the inadequacy of language. Words are symbols which stand for something other than themselves. What we want to communicate, therefore, is once removed from our means of doing so. Why do we even try then, when the odds of miscommunication are so great? As social creatures we cannot avoid it, and on a day-to-day basis we seem to get by all right. This is to say, our everyday language is close enough; it works well enough.

On deeper matters, however, the Taoist indirect approach seems the best. Poetry, for example, is for expressing what cannot otherwise be expressed, hence such poets of Taoism as Li Bai. Images in paintings, sculpture, and photographs accomplish the same thing. Zen is renowned for it images. There are ways, in short, of speaking about it without speaking about it, even as I speak about it here.