I've been on a bit of an ersatz zen koan kick lately (probably from *finally* having seen The Matrix.)
So I want to post this raw snippet of thought before I move onto other themes and it becomes an irrelevant non-sequitur. It's incomplete & likely flawed; but I hope to follow up on it someday when I feel I've got a better grasp on the tools to carve an angel out of this rock.
This snippet was inspired by a proximity of posts: one, a post regarding N.I.; & then the other, a post regarding enlightenment.
And then there was this article I came across while googling for koans.
I'm not sure that I entirely approve of the article itself. Due to its placement next to articles entitled "This is a Just War" and "Fighting Terrorism is Moral", it appears to me to have an unspoken slant towards justifying violence by using the argument, look, even Buddhists approve! ~~ which, I think, is an attempt to bend the principles of non~violence like a spoon. There is no Ahimsa...
But it was the title that had drawn my attention.
"the terror koan"
Because of that title, I had expected the article would discuss how cyclical violence is like a koan ~ not about whether Buddha would have approved of killing under certain circumstances.
Deriving peace from out of cycle of violence, and deriving enlightenment from a koan share the same dilemma of "you can't get there from here". A question of ethics, however, is not a koan ~ at least, not the way most western religions approach questions of ethics (or, at the very least, not the way my religion classes in Catholic school taught questions of ethics ~ very much based on logic, apart from the bits on ineffability).
And, for some reason known only to my Id, I'd also assumed that the article was going to be an exploration on how this related to the situation in N.I. ~ possibly because I've heard claim from several sources (though always tongue~in~cheek) that the joke "If you think you know what's going on, then you don't understand the problem" was coined in N.I. to describe the socio-political situation there. Though technically not fitting the definition of a koan, the joke does share with the koan the notion of paradox, and the inherent premise that one must question one's premises.
It seems ironically appropriate that the conundrum of how to reach a point of non-violence from out of a frame of reference of cyclical violence should be compared to a koan, when certain schools of Buddhism contain the paradox of being a non-violent philosophy that occasionally advocates violence, or the threat thereof, as a technique for reaching enlightenment.
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~ as if This Everything is so infinitely diverse, a paradox is the only way to explain it succinctly ~
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~~ a paradox is infinity in a nutshell ~~
Posted by edgar at May 22, 2003 09:41 AM