Parables for the blind

 

Well, you know what I think about thinking.......Not always the best option. Again, I just seem to be on a roller coaster at times, up and down, dark and light, alternating currents - but seeking to say "thank you" at all times, whether light or dark, good or bad. It's not much of a path, you tend to get lost, but much better than thinking I have been "found" by anyone, God or otherwise, or have accumulated a store of "wisdom" on which to draw.

Some words I read receǹtly made me think of the rather enigmatic parables of Jesus found in the NT. William Blake got them right......

The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision-s greatest enemy.
Thine has a great hook nose like thine;
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates;
Thy heaven doors are my hell gates.

"Spoken to the blind". That is exactly how they are described in the Gospels, parables used and spoken "that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand." The laugh line is that such an explanation is given alongside the statement that any true disciple will understand. Which the majority of readers will happily presume is them! All the folk met so often, the "I'm simply a true Christian" folk. Job done. No more mysteries.

At the moment I'm seeing all this through the lens of Wittgenstein, at least as I understand him. The paucity of logic, how little it can reveal of any worth. The paucity of "if I can't see it I won't believe it", Scientism and all the rest of the bankruptcy of our modern minds.

Well, I don't understand. Any of it. As the zen master Dogen said:- "Where you do not understand, there is your understanding."

I think I'm beginning to understand him!

Just to continue (sighs of discontent, but my coffee is still hot and I do not have to leave yet for Oxfam) my latest Blook is Dogen"s "Genjokoan", one of his most translated sermons.....or is it poems. Or what?

"Genjokoan". Variously translated as "The Issue at Hand", "The Actualization of Reaity", "Actualising the Fundamental Point" etc etc. Various ways of expressing the term, which perhaps gives insight into the difference between the Word as Text and the Living Word.

Anyway, for anyone interested, Dogen's Genjokoan ends with a little story of a zen master and a fan:-

As Zen master Pao-ch'e of Mount Ma-ku was fanning himself, a monk came and said, “The nature of wind is permanently abiding and there is no place it does not reach. Why, master, do you still use a fan?”
The master said, “You only know that the nature of wind is permanently abiding, but you do not yet know the true meaning of ‘there is no place it does not reach.’”
The monk said, “What is the true meaning of ‘there is no place it does not reach’?”
The master just fanned himself.
The monk bowed deeply.
The true experience of the Buddha-dharma and its living way of correct transmission are like this. To say, “If the nature of wind is permanently abiding we need not use a fan; even when we don't use a fan there should still be wind,” is to know neither the meaning of permanently abiding nor the nature of wind.
Because the nature of wind is permanently abiding, the wind of the house of the buddhas makes manifest the earth as pure gold and turns the long river into sweet cream.

I think we all have our own fan. Maybe we are the fan! What matters is our authenticity of practice - whatever it might be. But I think we have to care, for others but also, strangely, for ourselves.