Posted inMC Podcasts, Other Teachings

Teisho: Paradox

May 12, 2016

“Pick up a speck of dust, and nation prospers, and the villagers knit their brows in anxiety.
Put down a speck of dust, and the nation perishes, and everyone lives in peace.”

Description: Henry talks about paradox, using a few koans from Fuketsu to show how Zen’s many paradoxical teachings can lead to peace, love and true intimacy.  He offers an illuminated vision of the Buddha’s middle way.  The middle way is traditionally seen as the middle between excess or indulgence, and renunciation.  But another way to look at it is through the lens of western logic’s  “law of the excluded middle.”  Logic says there is me or not me, nothing in the middle.  Buddha stepped into that excluded middle and overturned the whole division between self and other, a discovery that thoroughly resolves the problem called “me.”

1024px-Dew_on_grass_Luc_Viatour

Post Image Credit: I, Luc Viatour [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured Image Credit: Reflection of Life, by Arghya Banik, CC BY 2.0.

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