According to Hui-neng in his commentary on the Diamond Sutra, real teaching (teaching that leads to realization) relies not on delivery of a preformulated message but on the spontaneous growth of meaning. A genuine dialogue flows like a mountain stream, carrying its names and forms forward. When particular symbols are used and deliberately manipulated as if their connections to dynamic objects were permanently fixed rather than continuously renewed with the flow of experience, they become obstacles like a rock in the stream, troubling it with turbulence, and the instead of flow we get ‘fluctuation.’
The Realized One’s speech and silence are both spontaneous; the words he utters are like echoes responding to sounds, occurring naturally without deliberate intent, not the same as the ordinary man preaching with a fluctuating mind. If any say that the Realized One preaches with fluctuation in his mind, they are slandering Buddha. The Sutra of Vimalakirti says, ‘Real teaching involves no preaching, no giving orders; listening to the teaching involves no hearing and no grasping.’ You realize that myriad things are empty, and all names and words are temporary setups; constructed within inherent emptiness, all the verbal expositions explain that all realities are signless and unfabricated, thus guiding deluded people in such a way as to get them to see their original nature and cultivate and realize unsurpassed enlightenment.
— (Cleary 1998, 134)
A ‘fluctuating mind’ here has a preconceived message which it is trying to ‘put over’ on others, rather than giving itself wholly and spontaneously to the flow of the dialogue. In Peircean terms, recognizing the genuine Secondness of ‘all realities’ leads to recognition of one’s original Firstness, or identity with the primal person. The Thirdness of signs is a means to the end of this beginning.
I wonder how this, “all the verbal expositions explain that all realities are signless and unfabricated.” ought be considered in light of Peirce’s idea that the universe (reality) is perfused with signs if it is not entirely semiosic?
Good question, Gary! I tried to anticipate it with the comment i tacked on to the end of the quote from Huineng, but didn’t succeed very well.
I think the idea that all “realities” are “signless” is used here to signify that the reality of things always escapes the names or labels we apply to them. So the universe we call “the truth” is indeed perfused with signs, but some of those signs have real objects that are not fabrications but are what they are regardless of what we call them. As you know, this is essentially Peirce’s definition of the word “real.”
In terms of Peirce’s “categories,” much of his semiotic/philosophy was an argument for the reality of Thirdness. General signs are themselves real when they involve genuine Secondness to their dynamic objects, or when they are laws really governing actual events. But it was only toward the end of his inquiry that Peirce affirmed the reality of Firstness. I think Zen teaching turns this around, so that the reality of Firstness comes first. Spontaneity rather than factuality or truth is the essence of primal reality for Zen, just as for Dogen, “impermanence is the buddha-nature.” All the dialogues and scriptures and turning signs are ways of effing the ineffable, naming the nameless, de*sign*ating the signless. What could be a sign of their success? Maybe a habit-change.
You concluded: “All the dialogues and scriptures and turning signs are ways of effing the ineffable, naming the nameless, de*sign*ating the signless. What could be a sign of their success? Maybe a habit-change.”
I think you’re right: the ‘turn’ of turning signs represents at least the possibility of a habit-change, perhaps even as potentially radical a change as is suggested by such expressions as ‘satori’, ‘kensho’, ‘enlightenment’.