In the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, I read the following statement:
This is the basic teaching of Buddhism. Pleasure is not different from difficulty. Good is not different from bad. Bad is good; good is bad. They are two sides of one coin.
How does this make sense? Does this mean that every good action (for example trying to reduce suffering) is somehow also bad? Or at least destined to fail?
From a Theravada perspective, there is absolute good and absolute bad. The 2 can exist mutually exclusively.
Suffering is absolutely bad and the mind states that lead to suffering are absolutely bad. Nibbana is absolutely good and the mind states that lead to Nibbana are absolutely good.
There is no suffering in Nibbana and there's no Nibbana in suffering. They arise/exist without requiring the presence of eachother.
When we are young and naive, we may have a very simplistic, polarized view of Good and Bad. Whoever is on our side, close to us, with us - is good, and whoever is on the other side is bad.
Then as we grow up we start developing a more sophisticated view of the world, in which we try to understand the different sides in every argument. Democrats vs Republican, India vs. Pakistan, Muslim vs Buddhist, Commerce vs Spirituality, Brexit or Stay, and so on - all these different dualities... We try to understand them as well as we can, identify pro's and con's and take the Good side, based on our own values and how their attributes match with our beliefs.
Then as we keep growing and start participating in situations ourselves, we may get into more complex scenarios, when the good may not always be good, and the bad may not always be bad. A drug dealer may use the money to help the poor. Buddha might have hurt his wife and child when he left home to pursue Enlightenment. Wolves hunt on hares - the murder of the hare is tragedy for the hare family, but is a hunting victory for the wolf family. There are all these different situations when good and bad are intermixed, depend on each other, and are two sides of the same coin.
There are however things that are invariaby good, regardless of which interpretative context you're in. In Buddhism traditionally, confusion is always bad, and clarity is always good. Suffering is always bad and peace is always good.
If you think about it a bit more however, you can see that even this may not always be true. Confusion may be saving someone who's not yet ready to know the truth, from getting hit by the reality they wouldn't be able to handle. Suffering may be a price we pay for progress, for growth, for helping others who are not always easy to help. So in Mahayana, even these old polarities of Confusion/Clarity and Suffering/Peace are not as black-and-white anymore. They too are conditional and subject to contextual interpretation.
Clarity that understands and appreciates both Clarity and Confusion, without rejecting either, without mixing them up, is the real Clarity. Being at Peace with Suffering is the real Peace.
Sentient beings have a tendency for reification, they tend to read-in solidity where there is none. "Right view with taints" already understands that clarity and peace are good, but still reifies them, still falsely assumes they can be solid, specific and tangible. "Right view without taints" is just analysis of factors. Now we are arriving at real clarity and peace.
Everything is perfect as is and no one needs saving, and yet, if I can, I'd like to try and help people move towards this peace and clarity - through the path of wisdom and tolerance.
These days, 99.9% of the books, if ever got printed out, are better used for toilet paper than for reading. (So f*** arrogant!! - I take the blame, ok :)
I've never read this book, just "scanning"; the title and what you quoted, what in Wikipedia about the author (I read that page when answering this post). This book useless but will waste my useful time if I read - Will never read.
Good is good, bad bad. Period. Trying to sex up words is clever scheme to induce interest of the reader though. But it harmed the mind, instills extra delusions and hinderances - corrupting the true Buddha Dharma, especially by claiming: "This is the basic teaching of Buddhism."
What truly useful, the wisdom, from real Buddhist teaching, is, "in good there is seed of bad, in bad seed of good." The ordinary can only see the good in good, bad in bad; the wise also the bad in (not "is"!!!) good, good in bad. Like the Chinese Yin-yang diagram Taiji, the black dot in the white, the white in the black - change. I-change (易經: I-Ching, how pre-telling the ancients able to pick the name, encompassing East and West). So, when the stock market swells, the vision it dipped; when bursted, foreseeing the boom. When life at the high, caution, time for downslope; at low, be alert, time for ascending soon; always keep your cool. Then you take the right action, with right attitude. This is what I called usefulness, real wisdom; not sexing-up words.
However, the pinnacle of comprehending, when qualified to utter: "good is bad, bad good, no difference", is when one able to truly dwelling in the state of Emptiness. Another word, Enlightened, Buddha-ed. But then the virtue is, silence. Period.
When one dwelling in Emptiness in real, he is able to transform - transform the physcial phenomena. A Chinese real Mahayana doctrine, "心能轉物, 即同如來" (When your citta/mind can turn the matter, you same as the Buddha), but is not learnt by other culture, yet.
Dwelling in Emptiness thus able to transform - legitimate to utter "good is bad, bad is good": Mahisasakas Vinaya recounted a very ardent Upāsikā she cut piece of flesh from her leg (market closed) to make soup in urgency for a sick Bhiksu who needed meat as medicine. When the Buddha visited her family she dying, she excused not shown for didn't want to worry him. Yet the Buddha insisted, her husband had to carry her out. Just right at seeing the face of the Buddha, she lapped on her feet, recovered. Her leg and all reverted to as before like nothing happened. This the power of Emptiness the Buddha demonstrated, the meat cut from the leg was no difference from not cut - good is bad, bad good. The Vinaya recounted another, the Buddha himself washed an old sick Bhiksu who spilled his defecations and vomits all-over his body and room; dirty is clean, clean dirty, no difference. If those who uttered that kind of words, get qualified first, please! Else what gives that sitting on the "dharma platform" to teach? Why not a street sweeper also teaching "dharma" but you? Since, street sweeper and "dharma teacher" are, no difference, right?
In this respect, I think one first learning the Theravadin teaching far safer than parroting the Mahayana or Zen one. The Chinese Canon placed Agamas (counterpart to the Pali Nikayas) as the First Section out of the Twelves, means its importance, had to be learnt first. Otherwise fiddling with those Mahayana terms in ambiguous abstruseness can only induce the readers to in$till your pocket/ego and your "dharma Hall ~ of Fame"; but not instilling any real Buddha Dharma to their minds.
I am a Buddhist of Theravadin Lineage, proud of it too, your comment "it is ok" could be interperated as deregatory. I hope my perception is off on this one and you refrain from attacks.
– Jan 12 '18 at 17:21If seeing that certain things are easy misleading, not having real base in Buddhas teaching, especially for Beginners, till Awakening, it's good to throw such simply FAR away, and such to do, reasonable, after probe, althought it might look aversive, is actually good and leads minimum to heavenly states as effect.
If wishing to understand of what the Buddhas way of use of a very needed duality is, to reach the unconditioned, the importance of wise discrimination, not foolish deciding to run away in a pseudo-nonduality, eg simply ignorance, The Road to Nirvana Is Paved with Skillful Intentions and Virtue without Attachment might be good starter.
Watch out how the "no-dual" Zenis will react on the answer, to get the message.
In regard of feelings, it's right that pleasant as well as unpleasant feelings are suffering as well, it's just missed that neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant feelings have this as well. Why? Because (the hide in) ignorance is not lasting.
As for deeds by mind, speech and body, there are skillful and unskillful, and yes, skillful often are not pleasing, because burdensome seen, connected with letting go and give.
[Note: This is a gift of Dhamma, not meant for commercial use or other lower wordily gains by ways of exchange or trade]
It means that both pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow are part of suffering (dukkha).
Pain causes suffering when you encounter it. Pleasure causes suffering when you lose it or if you're denied it.
From SN56.11:
"The Noble Truth of Suffering (dukkha), monks, is this: Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, association with the unpleasant is suffering, dissociation from the pleasant is suffering, not to receive what one desires is suffering — in brief the five aggregates subject to grasping are suffering.
This type of statement taken at face value is rightfully said to deprive words of their rightful meaning which effectively solves the problem of inability to explain words with words by means of abstration. IE "apple=orange" as both clearly fruit , but if u asked for an apple and got an orange that model dont work. One could rightfully say "apple=orange" in sense that they are both fruit" but not the generalization. In same way whole doctrines are built on oversimplified models that are based on abstraction. Like a child s drawing of a plane one should not expect it to fly or make sense like engineering plans.
Also to anybody familiar with the actual Discourses of the historical Buddha, it should be obvious that this very much obscures the meaning of the teachings and is definitely not how the doctrine was taught. IE there is a way to say that all reality is suffering but there is a way to delineate what we called suffering into more subsets of experience and even make room for words like happiness and rightfully apply that to what is suffering in a different context/perspective and in the Suttas both contexts and meanings are found and should be discriminated.
This is also why physicists have to differentiate between classical and quantum mechanics. It seems to me that it is also right to say that The Perfect Ones teach the Middle Way as in not teaching the extreme views of both micro and macro perspectives but rather explaining their nature & the connection between them fully, providing a way for wise people to fully know and see and for unwise people to become wise even.
When addressing the issue of explaining words with words, it is stated(interpretation not a quote) that some Elements are to be experienced for knowledge rather than intellectual poundering and reasoning as some things can only be explained, they cannot be described, see MN72.
It is similar to trying to fully express Irrational Numbers like Pi in mathematical language, Circumference is an Abstraction, so is R, therefore it is irrational when expressed mathematicly. Circumference is a word, that can be expressed/translated in mathematical symbols but both type of symbols are an abstraction, one cant derive the "real thing" from abstractions, only get a better model, therefore it is "irrational" because it is not something "real", the engineering plans are not the plane, it would be truly irrational to expect engineering plans to function like the plane. Similar to how a map is not the territory, label is not the object, name is not the person etc but it is even more deep and profound of a teaching than that.
After the fireworks,
the spectators departed:
how vast and dark the sky! (c)
It is something like this. always there is duality in everything. Black white,good bad,beauty ugly etc. In order to see one instead of another, it should be comparatively high in content. Here good is not different from bad is same concept. If we see something is good we compare it with our old memories. In some point we have seen the same thing in as bad. We feel good now compare to our previous recognition. So everything has duality. Any action has good and bad side. Its just the way we look at it. Limitation of thinking
