the point – Page 4 – Turning Signs

Higher than existence

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places people reject and so is like the Tao.

— Tao Te Ching 8 (Feng/English)

The same text translated by Red Pine:

The best are like water
bringing help to all
without competing

A comment on this text by Wang Pi (included in Red Pine’s edition, p. 17):

The Tao does not exist, but water does. Hence, it only approaches the Tao.

Charles S. Peirce would agree that the highest good does not exist, although it is real. In this he differed from most Western philosophers of his time.

The modern philosophers — one and all, unless Schelling be an exception — recognize but one mode of being, the being of an individual thing or fact, the being which consists in the object’s crowding out a place for itself in the universe, so to speak, and reacting by brute force of fact, against all other things. I call that existence.

— Peirce, CP 1.21 (from the “Lowell Lectures of 1903,” Lecture IIIa)

‘“Turning words” are expressions that turn one to realization’ (Aitken 1991, 24) – whether spoken with that intention or not. Somehow they overcome the inertia that keeps you moving in the same habitual direction. But is this virtue, this power, to be found in the word itself? Perhaps it should be called instead a ‘pivot word’ (Heine 1999, 4): it marks the turning point.

From the Glossary appended to Dogen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye:

turning point: 轉処 [tensho]. 轉機 [tenki], literally, turning event. A place where delusion is transformed into enlightenment.

— Tanahashi 2010, 1139

Only when you get here will you know (the meaning of the) ancient saying, ‘Mind revolves along with myriad phenomena; the turning point is truly mysterious.’

— Blue Cliff Record, Case 22 (Cleary and Cleary 1977, 152)

How to discern the point? Even the Buddhas of the past, present and future, and even the Zen masters over the ages, cannot shoot this black star. How do you shoot it?

— Hakuin (Cleary 2002, 4)

The Guest

If you know you’re alive,
find the essence of life.
Life is the sort of guest
you don’t meet twice.

— the Bijak of Kabir

Lasting

The reason the world is able to be lasting and enduring
Is because it does not live for itself.

— Dao De Jing 7 (Ames)

Thanksgiving

Hunt for bounty with the net of gratitude.

— Rumi (Helminski 2000, 59)

The Big Bloom

Good and evil, dead and alive, everything blooms from one natural stem.

— Rumi (Helminski 2000, 111)

Untitled

When rivers enter the ocean, the waters lose their names.

—Chih-i (Cleary 1997c, 486)

Advice

If you want to know the meaning of buddha-nature, observe the conditions of the time.

— Blue Cliff Record (Cleary 2002, 126)

Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.

— J. A. Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (2000), p. 235.

When you come to a fork in the road— take it.

— Yogi Berra

Always think twice before taking advice.

— gnox

Becoming

Nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be.

— anon

Everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming.

— Floyd Merrell (2003, 70)

The past will never look like the future did.

— gnox

Wounderworkers

The wise are they that speak not unless they obtain a hearing.

— Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words (Persian) #36

Perfect activity leaves no track behind it; perfect speech is like a jade-worker whose tool leaves no mark.

— Tao Te Ching 27 (Waley)

Time heals all wounds as silence heals all words.

— gnox