Author: gnox

Upon ‘discovering the principle of all things in the point of a moment of thought’ (Avatamsaka Sutra, Cleary 1984, 1163), the universe is a single turning.

How is it when it is expressed completely in a single phrase?

— Dogen, EK 2.133

Your turn.

Dongshan instructed the assembly saying, “Experiencing the matter of going beyond buddhas, finally capable, you can speak a little.”
A monk immediately asked, “What is speaking?”
Dongshan said, “At the time of speaking, you do not hear.”
The monk said, “Master, do you hear or not?”
Dongshan said, “Just when I do not speak, then I hear.”

— Dogen, EK 9.50

I never actually collect together, or call up simultaneously, all the primary thoughts which contribute to my perception or to my present conviction.

— Merleau-Ponty 1945, 71)

No particular thought reaches through to the core of our thought in general, nor is any thought conceivable without another possible thought as a witness to it.

— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 465)

In more Peircean terms, a ‘particular thought’ is an abstraction from the continuum of semiosis, whose ‘core’ is living the time. Sign, object and interpretant (Merleau-Ponty’s “thought as a witness”) are all abstracted from the process in order to symbolize and explicate semiosis.

… thought is not at all only the moving around of fixed entities, concepts that are defined, ‘pieces’ of knowledge. Thought is always very largely implicit and, as I tried to show (in ECM and in ‘Thinking Beyond Patterns,’ 1992) the implicit is not some fringe or periphery around what we centrally think. Rather, the sense we are making, the central point we are making, is had only as a carrying forward of an implicit complexity. What is implicitly functioning is the point itself, of what we are saying or thinking, just then.

— Gendlin (1998, 8a)

How resplendent the luminaries of knowledge that shine in an atom, and how vast the oceans of wisdom that surge within a drop!

— Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán ¶107

Wan-sung says: ‘The moment one particle is brought up, the whole earth is contained in it. Who is it that can open the borders and extend the land as a lone rider with a single lance, and so can be the master anywhere and encounter the source in everything?’

— Cleary 1997b, 323

Do not think that to face a person is to understand a person. Do not think that not to face a person is not to understand a person. Those who understand a speck of dust understand the entire world. Those who master one thing master myriad things. Those who do not master myriad things do not master one thing. Because those who study mastering see myriad things as well as one thing through penetration, those who study a speck of dust simultaneously study the entire world.

— Dogen, ‘Shoaku makusa’ (Tanahashi 2010, 102)

One thought. fills immensity.

— Blake (MHH)

This is the abode of those with unobstructed eyes
Who perceive infinite lands, buddhas, beings,
And ages, in a single point, going in and out
Without encountering any boundaries.

— Gandhavyuha Sutra (Cleary 1984, 1459)

One statement removes obstructing fixations; one statement fills everywhere. Tell me, which statement do the enlightened ones use to help people?
I have a statement that the enlightened ones have never made, and which I will quote to you.

Complete.

— Dogen (Cleary 1995, 47)

A seed, as ‘an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth’ (Chapter 18), is a symbol of the Point. Another is the dewdrop, as for instance in Yeats:

All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.

— ‘Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors’

or in Dogen’s ‘Genjokoan’:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.

(Tanahashi 2010, 31)

The pearl in Thomas 76, the big fish in Thomas 8, the hidden treasure – each is a symbol of the phaneron.

The timeless thusness of this one bright pearl is boundless. It is just that the entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl, not two or three. The entire body is one true dharma eye, the true body, a single phrase. The entire body is illumination; the entire body is the entire mind. When the entire body is the entire body, there is no hindrance. It is gently curved and turns round and round.

— Dogen, ‘One Bright Pearl’ (Tanahashi 2010, 37)

The end of a path is where it points,
the point where it ends.

Stops are punctuation marks (Latin punctum, a prick, point or spot). What is a period? A full stop, or a space of time? It comes from the Greek peri hodos, which means ‘road around.’ Think fast, or fast from thinking, and you find yourself back at the starting point before you’ve left. Stop here.

On a continuous line, a point is punctuation.
In speech, a pause is punctuation.
In written language a space is punctuation.

Can one describe, as if seeing it from above, something within which we are contained, of which we are part, and from which we cannot exit?

— Eco (1998, 20)

The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description.

— Peirce (EP1:227, W5:164, CP 3.363)

According to the Liddell and Scott lexicon, the word σημεῖον (the usual Greek word for sign and root of semeiotic) was also used by Aristotle for a mathematical point, or a point in time. In this sense it was synonymous with στιγμή (stigma).

Now upon a continuous line there are no points (where the line is continuous), there is only room for points,— possibilities of points. Yet it is through that continuum, that line of generalization of possibilities that the actual point at one extremity necessarily leads to the actual point at the other extremity. The actualization of the two extremities consists in the two facts that at the first, without any general reason the continuum there begins while at the last, equally without reason, it is brutally, i.e. irrationally but forcibly cut off.

— Peirce, “PAP” (R 293, 1906); NEM 4, 330

The same goes for time and semiosis.

‘“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)