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Post by inavalan on Feb 27, 2021 21:21:01 GMT -5
I read your posts about Bobbie-san, and looked up Sekiso's ' How do you step forward from a 100 m Pole?' koan. I think that: 1. If you find yourself on the top of a 100 foot pole, it means that you didn't pay attention for quite a while. Lack of vision? Blind faith? Wishful thinking? You shouldn't have gotten in that situation. 2. If you find yourself on the top of a 100 foot pole, the only solution is to climb down. Which Bobbie did! I wonder if his high IQ was responsible both for getting up there (not as in "being able", but as in "not foreseeing the situation"), and also for his climbing down.  Obviously my reply was metaphorical too ... You metaphorically "climb down" ... Bobbie's realization of his being "on the top of a 100 foot pole", and his subsequent "climbing down", were a non-theoretical situation, a non-speech about "The Diamond Sutra". I keep thinking back about "The Diamond Sutra". Today I found an interesting article "Finding New Meaning in One of the World’s Oldest Books" (2009); a few excerpts: | | shc.stanford.edu/news/research/buddhist-diamond-sutra
Since at least the fifth century, generations of Buddhists have memorized and chanted the Diamond Sutra, a short Mahayana Buddhist scripture. The work, which offers meditations on illusion and perception, was originally written in Sanskrit and first translated into Chinese in 402 A.D.
Despite the text’s longevity, Stanford religious studies professor Paul Harrison’s latest research suggests that previous translations may have incorrectly interpreted certain words in a way that affects the entire meaning of the text. For the last seven years Prof. Harrison has been working on re-editing and re-translating the Diamond Sutra. ...
Harrison’s familiarity with previous translations has not stopped him from making his own amendments to the text. His mission is to correct, in his view, a flaw that has been propagated in the many translations of the Diamond Sutra, something that he only became aware of by spending so much time with the text and struggling with the puzzle its logic presents. Most existing translations feature negative statements saying things like “a bookcase is not a bookcase, therefore it’s called a bookcase,” to use an example from our own experience. ...
“You’re left with a kind of negation which says AB is not AB —or not B, if the translator is being more careful—therefore it is AB.” “It seems to come out as a simple denial of identity, which to my mind doesn’t make good sense, and therefore people are left thinking that the Diamond Sutra is engaging in a mystical subversion of ordinary language. But in my view, that doesn’t make sense.” ...
Harrison hopes that his work on the Diamond Sutra, which is set for publication in 2010, will avoid some of the problems often found in the translation of Buddhist texts. From the reviews he has gotten from Buddhist philosophers who have seen preliminary versions of his translation, it looks like he may be on to something.
“I’m happy to say that so far they have reacted very positively to this new way of approaching the Diamond Sutra, which rescues it from negative mysticism and tries to think more about the doctrinal program that underlies the text,” Harrison said.
“They tell me that this way of translating it makes more sense, so I’m encouraged by that. I’m going to continue with this way of reading it.”
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Here's an interview with dr. Harrison (2009): I found both of them quite interesting. |
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Post by Reefs on Feb 27, 2021 22:34:24 GMT -5
Have you read "The Diamond Sutra? I have to confess that when it comes to sutras I'm a bit of an ignoramus. But I've read the heart sutra and always liked it a lot. The way I remember the diamond sutra is that it explains the nature and degree of illusion, but I think it's a rather long text. And this is something peculiar about Buddhism. I really like the Buddha because I recognize his version of SR, but I'm not really fond of Buddhism, tbh. The sheer volume of sutras is quite overwhelming. IMO, the Buddhists have this unfortunate habit of turning simple truths into a complicated treatise. Buddhism is a big tent though. So if I would have to choose a flavor, I'd say the only flavor of Buddhism that is mostly to my liking is Chan, the original Chinese version of Buddhism. Zen, the Japanese version of the Chinese version, I think has become a watered down and rather dogmatic version of the original, which actually was mixture of Taoism and Buddhism. Here's a site that has a 'complete' list of sutras: buddhasutra.com/ |
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Post by Reefs on Feb 27, 2021 23:09:37 GMT -5
Obviously my reply was metaphorical too ... You metaphorically "climb down" ... Bobbie's realization of his being "on the top of a 100 foot pole", and his subsequent "climbing down", were a non-theoretical situation, a non-speech about "The Diamond Sutra". I keep thinking back about "The Diamond Sutra". Today I found an interesting article "Finding New Meaning in One of the World’s Oldest Books" (2009); a few excerpts: | | shc.stanford.edu/news/research/buddhist-diamond-sutra
Since at least the fifth century, generations of Buddhists have memorized and chanted the Diamond Sutra, a short Mahayana Buddhist scripture. The work, which offers meditations on illusion and perception, was originally written in Sanskrit and first translated into Chinese in 402 A.D.
Despite the text’s longevity, Stanford religious studies professor Paul Harrison’s latest research suggests that previous translations may have incorrectly interpreted certain words in a way that affects the entire meaning of the text. For the last seven years Prof. Harrison has been working on re-editing and re-translating the Diamond Sutra. ...
Harrison’s familiarity with previous translations has not stopped him from making his own amendments to the text. His mission is to correct, in his view, a flaw that has been propagated in the many translations of the Diamond Sutra, something that he only became aware of by spending so much time with the text and struggling with the puzzle its logic presents. Most existing translations feature negative statements saying things like “a bookcase is not a bookcase, therefore it’s called a bookcase,” to use an example from our own experience. ...
“You’re left with a kind of negation which says AB is not AB —or not B, if the translator is being more careful—therefore it is AB.” “It seems to come out as a simple denial of identity, which to my mind doesn’t make good sense, and therefore people are left thinking that the Diamond Sutra is engaging in a mystical subversion of ordinary language. But in my view, that doesn’t make sense.” ...
Harrison hopes that his work on the Diamond Sutra, which is set for publication in 2010, will avoid some of the problems often found in the translation of Buddhist texts. From the reviews he has gotten from Buddhist philosophers who have seen preliminary versions of his translation, it looks like he may be on to something.
“I’m happy to say that so far they have reacted very positively to this new way of approaching the Diamond Sutra, which rescues it from negative mysticism and tries to think more about the doctrinal program that underlies the text,” Harrison said.
“They tell me that this way of translating it makes more sense, so I’m encouraged by that. I’m going to continue with this way of reading it.”
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Here's an interview with dr. Harrison (2009): I found both of them quite interesting. Good find! The part about translators making a specific choice is spot on because that's exactly the same what happened with case #1 of the Blue Cliff Record. Someone decided to translate Bodhidharma's reply as " I don't know" and all other translators and commentators just followed that lead, even though it doesn't really make sense, or at least is debatable. And only when you go back to the original text you'll notice that Bodhidharma's reply is actually rather ambiguous and allows for different - and equally valid! - readings, which puts the entire case into a whole different light. So I hope people take this as a cautionary tale again, to not rely on translations or books in general. We've regularly had literal quote wars over (usually out of context) quotes from Niz and Ramana, people being absolutely sure what they've said and actually meant while parsing questionable English translations of the original words from both masters that they found via google search. That's how ridiculous this can get! What he says about the content of the diamond sutra, that sounds a lot like what Alan Watts was getting at in his talk about the symbolic and the real; i.e. people use the symbolic out of convenience, because it has practical value, but for whatever reason, at some point, people tend to forget that it is just symbolic and start mistaking the symbolic for the real. And that's when all the confusion begins which eventually leads to different degrees of existential suffering. |
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Post by inavalan on Feb 28, 2021 0:33:11 GMT -5
I found both of them quite interesting. Good find! The part about translators making a specific choice is spot on because that's exactly the same what happened with case #1 of the Blue Cliff Record. Someone decided to translate Bodhidharma's reply as " I don't know" and all other translators and commentators just followed that lead, even though it doesn't really make sense, or at least is debatable. And only when you go back to the original text you'll notice that Bodhidharma's reply is actually rather ambiguous and allows for different - and equally valid! - readings, which puts the entire case into a whole different light. So I hope people take this as a cautionary tale again, to not rely on translations or books in general. We've regularly had literal quote wars over (usually out of context) quotes from Niz and Ramana, people being absolutely sure what they've said and actually meant while parsing questionable English translations of the original words from both masters that they found via google search. That's how ridiculous this can get! What he says about the content of the diamond sutra, that sounds a lot like what Alan Watts was getting at in his talk about the symbolic and the real; i.e. people use the symbolic out of convenience, because it has practical value, but for whatever reason, at some point, people tend to forget that it is just symbolic and start mistaking the symbolic for the real. And that's when all the confusion begins which eventually leads to different degrees of existential suffering. I think too that it is important to interpret the symbolism of those ancient texts, and not to take it at face value. I believe that most seminal texts include a multi-layered symbolism that allows them to convey knowledge to each seeker according to the seeker's level. That is why a person re-reading such a text, after some time, discovers in it new and more profound meanings, because that reader isn't the same person anymore, he grew at a different level. This applies to re-reading Abraham or Seth too, and to some degree to our way of looking at reality. I found another commentary on the same idea, that partially appreciates dr. Harrison's reinterpretation, although the author doesn't agree 100%, and if I understood it correctly his disagreement is about conceptual vs. real, what you mentioned.
| The use of Negation in Vajracchedikā
jayarava.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-use-of-negation-in-vajracchedika.html
The author writes:
... We've mentioned that the English practice is to treat the compounds as karmadhāryas ("no-system"). Harrison points out that the Chinese also read karmadhārayas, because they negate the terms using 非 fēi rather than 無 wú (cf the negations in the Heart Sutra which all use 無). What interests Harrison is that the Tibetans treat the compounds as bahuvrīhi (X med pa or X ma mchis pa) and that this seems to be the better reading. In the case of lokadhātu/adhātu we might, with the Chinese, construe this as 'the world system (or realm, sphere, element, etc.) is not a system'; or '...is a non-system'; or '...is no system at all.' However, we may also read it as saying that lokadhātu lacks a system or that there is no system in it (138). Harrison translates:
"Any world system there is has been preached by the Realized One as systemless. Thus it is called a world-system" ... |
Here there's a pdf of the Diamond Sutra's translation by dr. Paul Harrison, without commentaries: After the article and the video referenced in my previous post, I tried to intuitively think about: | | “a bookcase is not a bookcase, therefore it’s called a bookcase,”
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and I came with the possibility:
| “a bookcase is not a / any case, it’s a bookcase,”
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Post by inavalan on Feb 28, 2021 0:58:42 GMT -5
After the article and the video referenced in my previous post, I tried to intuitively think about: | | “a bookcase is not a bookcase, therefore it’s called a bookcase,”
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and I came with the possibility:
| “a bookcase is not a / any case, it’s a bookcase,”
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This reminds of set-phrases:
| When the interpreter was translating for the former Russian President Gorbachev about his trip to San Francisco in 1990, his pronunciation was good, but he placed himself on the outside by repeatedly saying "cable car" (accent on car). The phrase "cable car" (accent on cable, only) is an image, an established entity, and it was very noticeable to hear it stressed on the second word as a mere description.
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So:
| “a bookcase is not only a book case, that's why it’s called a bookcase,”
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Post by Reefs on Feb 28, 2021 8:11:52 GMT -5
Good find! The part about translators making a specific choice is spot on because that's exactly the same what happened with case #1 of the Blue Cliff Record. Someone decided to translate Bodhidharma's reply as " I don't know" and all other translators and commentators just followed that lead, even though it doesn't really make sense, or at least is debatable. And only when you go back to the original text you'll notice that Bodhidharma's reply is actually rather ambiguous and allows for different - and equally valid! - readings, which puts the entire case into a whole different light. So I hope people take this as a cautionary tale again, to not rely on translations or books in general. We've regularly had literal quote wars over (usually out of context) quotes from Niz and Ramana, people being absolutely sure what they've said and actually meant while parsing questionable English translations of the original words from both masters that they found via google search. That's how ridiculous this can get! What he says about the content of the diamond sutra, that sounds a lot like what Alan Watts was getting at in his talk about the symbolic and the real; i.e. people use the symbolic out of convenience, because it has practical value, but for whatever reason, at some point, people tend to forget that it is just symbolic and start mistaking the symbolic for the real. And that's when all the confusion begins which eventually leads to different degrees of existential suffering. I think too that it is important to interpret the symbolism of those ancient texts, and not to take it at face value. I believe that most seminal texts include a multi-layered symbolism that allows them to convey knowledge to each seeker according to the seeker's level. That is why a person re-reading such a text, after some time, discovers in it new and more profound meanings, because that reader isn't the same person anymore, he grew at a different level. This applies to re-reading Abraham or Seth too, and to some degree to our way of looking at reality. I found another commentary on the same idea, that partially appreciates dr. Harrison's reinterpretation, although the author doesn't agree 100%, and if I understood it correctly his disagreement is about conceptual vs. real, what you mentioned.
| The use of Negation in Vajracchedikā
jayarava.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-use-of-negation-in-vajracchedika.html
The author writes:
... We've mentioned that the English practice is to treat the compounds as karmadhāryas ("no-system"). Harrison points out that the Chinese also read karmadhārayas, because they negate the terms using 非 fēi rather than 無 wú (cf the negations in the Heart Sutra which all use 無). What interests Harrison is that the Tibetans treat the compounds as bahuvrīhi (X med pa or X ma mchis pa) and that this seems to be the better reading. In the case of lokadhātu/adhātu we might, with the Chinese, construe this as 'the world system (or realm, sphere, element, etc.) is not a system'; or '...is a non-system'; or '...is no system at all.' However, we may also read it as saying that lokadhātu lacks a system or that there is no system in it (138). Harrison translates:
"Any world system there is has been preached by the Realized One as systemless. Thus it is called a world-system" ... |
Here there's a pdf of the Diamond Sutra's translation by dr. Paul Harrison, without commentaries: After the article and the video referenced in my previous post, I tried to intuitively think about: | | “a bookcase is not a bookcase, therefore it’s called a bookcase,”
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and I came with the possibility:
| “a bookcase is not a / any case, it’s a bookcase,”
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Thanks for the link. I'll take a look at it. Quite fascinating. |
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Post by laughter on Feb 28, 2021 23:58:19 GMT -5
I keep thinking back about "The Diamond Sutra". Today I found an interesting article "Finding New Meaning in One of the World’s Oldest Books" (2009); a few excerpts: | | shc.stanford.edu/news/research/buddhist-diamond-sutra
Since at least the fifth century, generations of Buddhists have memorized and chanted the Diamond Sutra, a short Mahayana Buddhist scripture. The work, which offers meditations on illusion and perception, was originally written in Sanskrit and first translated into Chinese in 402 A.D.
Despite the text’s longevity, Stanford religious studies professor Paul Harrison’s latest research suggests that previous translations may have incorrectly interpreted certain words in a way that affects the entire meaning of the text. For the last seven years Prof. Harrison has been working on re-editing and re-translating the Diamond Sutra. ...
Harrison’s familiarity with previous translations has not stopped him from making his own amendments to the text. His mission is to correct, in his view, a flaw that has been propagated in the many translations of the Diamond Sutra, something that he only became aware of by spending so much time with the text and struggling with the puzzle its logic presents. Most existing translations feature negative statements saying things like “a bookcase is not a bookcase, therefore it’s called a bookcase,” to use an example from our own experience. ...
“You’re left with a kind of negation which says AB is not AB —or not B, if the translator is being more careful—therefore it is AB.” “It seems to come out as a simple denial of identity, which to my mind doesn’t make good sense, and therefore people are left thinking that the Diamond Sutra is engaging in a mystical subversion of ordinary language. But in my view, that doesn’t make sense.” ...
Harrison hopes that his work on the Diamond Sutra, which is set for publication in 2010, will avoid some of the problems often found in the translation of Buddhist texts. From the reviews he has gotten from Buddhist philosophers who have seen preliminary versions of his translation, it looks like he may be on to something.
“I’m happy to say that so far they have reacted very positively to this new way of approaching the Diamond Sutra, which rescues it from negative mysticism and tries to think more about the doctrinal program that underlies the text,” Harrison said.
“They tell me that this way of translating it makes more sense, so I’m encouraged by that. I’m going to continue with this way of reading it.”
|
Here's an interview with dr. Harrison (2009): I found both of them quite interesting. Good find! The part about translators making a specific choice is spot on because that's exactly the same what happened with case #1 of the Blue Cliff Record. Someone decided to translate Bodhidharma's reply as " I don't know" and all other translators and commentators just followed that lead, even though it doesn't really make sense, or at least is debatable. And only when you go back to the original text you'll notice that Bodhidharma's reply is actually rather ambiguous and allows for different - and equally valid! - readings, which puts the entire case into a whole different light. So I hope people take this as a cautionary tale again, to not rely on translations or books in general. We've regularly had literal quote wars over (usually out of context) quotes from Niz and Ramana, people being absolutely sure what they've said and actually meant while parsing questionable English translations of the original words from both masters that they found via google search. That's how ridiculous this can get! What he says about the content of the diamond sutra, that sounds a lot like what Alan Watts was getting at in his talk about the symbolic and the real; i.e. people use the symbolic out of convenience, because it has practical value, but for whatever reason, at some point, people tend to forget that it is just symbolic and start mistaking the symbolic for the real. And that's when all the confusion begins which eventually leads to different degrees of existential suffering. In my past readings of the DS I've compared these two different versions: (1) seemingly older, native speakers to English (2) more recent, English speaker to English heh heh the Buddha was the first neo-Advaitist.  The DS verses make that distinction between "the thing" and "the idea of the thing" in multiple instances. I found each version to be helpful, for different reasons. I'm interested in what Harris has to say, but, as far as this form of double-negation that he objects to, it's a form that you should be familiar with. I intend to follow inavalen's links, but only after I'm done re-reading those two familiar versions. Wanted to get these examples down now as they occurred to me in the reading: === Unconditional peace is an absence. It's not dependent on the conditions that people need for peace, which is why we call it peace. Any enlightened person will tell you that there's no such thing as an enlightened person. A pointer is a concept, but it can't be understood conceptually, which is why we call it a pointer. The existential truth is ineffable, and can only be pointed to. So, the existential truth is that any statement of the existential truth is not the existential truth. "Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both." |
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Post by inavalan on Mar 1, 2021 18:12:29 GMT -5
This is an interesting article about the accuracy of the Bible's translations to English, relating to various translation approaches, with pros and cons (I mean as arguments, not as translation-pros, and translation-cons ... ). The 5 Most Accurate Bible Translations: faithfoundedonfact.com/the-5-most-accurate-bible-translations/(surely the site name made me chuckle: faith-founded-on-fact ; disclaimer: never read the Bible) The author's classification of various English translations:  |
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Post by laughter on Mar 1, 2021 19:16:23 GMT -5
This is an interesting article about the accuracy of the Bible's translations to English, relating to various translation approaches, with pros and cons (I mean as arguments, not as translation-pros, and translation-cons ... ). The 5 Most Accurate Bible Translations: faithfoundedonfact.com/the-5-most-accurate-bible-translations/(surely the site name made me chuckle: faith-founded-on-fact ; disclaimer: never read the Bible) The author's classification of various English translations: Did you notice any Biblical parallels in the Diamond Sutra? |
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Post by inavalan on Mar 1, 2021 20:27:02 GMT -5
This is an interesting article about the accuracy of the Bible's translations to English, relating to various translation approaches, with pros and cons (I mean as arguments, not as translation-pros, and translation-cons ... ). The 5 Most Accurate Bible Translations: faithfoundedonfact.com/the-5-most-accurate-bible-translations/(surely the site name made me chuckle: faith-founded-on-fact ; disclaimer: never read the Bible) The author's classification of various English translations: Did you notice any Biblical parallels in the Diamond Sutra? I haven't read any of them. On another forum there are people arguing Bible and Gospel of Thomas related subjects (among other spiritual subjects), and I was curious what are they arguing about so I googled, and found some interesting stuff. My general opinion is that everything in thoses texts is symbolical, and the translations and the hearsay inherently added some distortions. I haven't read the Diamond Sutra either. I took a quick look a couple of days ago at #25 on a 2-3 translations. Some translations sound awkward to me, Harrison's included too. |
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Post by laughter on Mar 1, 2021 21:13:17 GMT -5
Did you notice any Biblical parallels in the Diamond Sutra? I haven't read any of them. On another forum there are people arguing Bible and Gospel of Thomas related subjects (among other spiritual subjects), and I was curious what are they arguing about so I googled, and found some interesting stuff. My general opinion is that everything in thoses texts is symbolical, and the translations and the hearsay inherently added some distortions. I haven't read the Diamond Sutra either. I took a quick look a couple of days ago at #25 on a 2-3 translations. Some translations sound awkward to me, Harrison's included too. oh, ok. For whatever it might be worth to you or anyone else, I'll relate that my personal experience with Christianity is that my conceptions of it didn't survive direct encounter with it's practitioner's. And this isn't to suggest the same would be true for you, nor that all of those conceptions (years ago, secular humanist, years later, "nondualist") were entirely wrong. But, there was an unexpected dimension to it. And yes, there are several interesting parallels between the Bible and the DS. |
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Post by Peter on Mar 2, 2021 4:02:19 GMT -5
my personal experience with Christianity is that my conceptions of it didn't survive direct encounter with it's practitioner's. As in you thought it was a tool for controlling the masses and found that the practitioners actually had genuinely touched something spiritually, OR that you thought it was a teaching about love and found its practitioners to have missed this point entirely? |
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Post by zendancer on Mar 2, 2021 7:08:29 GMT -5
my personal experience with Christianity is that my conceptions of it didn't survive direct encounter with it's practitioner's. As in you thought it was a tool for controlling the masses and found that the practitioners actually had genuinely touched something spiritually, OR that you thought it was a teaching about love and found its practitioners to have missed this point entirely? I suspect that Jesus was pointing toward non-duality, but unfortunately his followers never looked in the direction he was pointing. |
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Post by laughter on Mar 2, 2021 14:04:10 GMT -5
my personal experience with Christianity is that my conceptions of it didn't survive direct encounter with it's practitioner's. As in you thought it was a tool for controlling the masses and found that the practitioners actually had genuinely touched something spiritually, OR that you thought it was a teaching about love and found its practitioners to have missed this point entirely? All of that, actually. There's no denying the elements of social control, but only by joining them in prayer did I find that there is an opportunity in that prayer to be touched spiritually. The message of love is there for anyone to hear, and it's obvious that some of them have missed that point entirely. It's also possible to listen for those that haven't missed the point entirely, and by engaging with their practices one can come to understand that dynamic in greater depth and appreciate the spectrum along which it runs. The priests and missionaries I met were all the first to admit that the Church is the work of men (and women), and thereby flawed. Any of them preaching otherwise is, in my opinion, one of those who has likely missed the point entirely. |
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Post by inavalan on Mar 2, 2021 14:14:01 GMT -5
As in you thought it was a tool for controlling the masses and found that the practitioners actually had genuinely touched something spiritually, OR that you thought it was a teaching about love and found its practitioners to have missed this point entirely? I suspect that Jesus was pointing toward non-duality, but unfortunately his followers never looked in the direction he was pointing. I know that feeling. I have it too. It's just it confirms what I believe, which is different than what you do |
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