cyee@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Chut Ngeow YEE) (05/30/91)
This is a short talk that I found in a humorous book with a humorous title "God is Not a Gentleman and I am That One". I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Master Da : We do not know why the Chinese made these jade disks. I am wearing one on my body and nobody knows what the hell it is. This is a good enough purpose for it! (Laughter.) To not know what it is is as good as any other purpose. It is circular and has a hole in it - what is the meaning of a vagina? What does the vagina mean? What does it mean? What does it MEAN? What does a penis mean? You know what it does, what you like about it, but what does it mean? What does a tree mean? What does a lozenge mean? What does a fan mean? What does a lemon mean? What does a closet mean? What does a hair mean? What is the meaning of a shirt? The meaning of underwear? What is the meaning of a button? Or a tooth? What is the meaning of a nostril, what is the meaning of two nostrils? The brows, perhaps, what is their meaning? Very few things enter into the sphere of meaning, you see? Meanings are for the sake of social intercourse. Meaning is for getting things done in the ordinary way in daily life, but meaning does not interfere with most of existence. We think meaning encompasses everything, because we are in the mind of meanings. Actually, however, meaning interferes with hardly anything. We really do not exist in a world of meaning. The world of meaning is reduced to the practicalities of ordinary life. There is very little meaning elsewhere. Being habituated to practical life, you say, "What does it all means?" as if there were an answer to that. There is no answer to it at all. You cannot project the mind of meaning upon the total universe, upon existence itself. To enter into the universe totally, to enter into the sphere of existence itself, you must go beyond the world of meaning. You could still use words, but they do not quite have the force of meaning any longer, they are more like pointers, vague gestures, dancers. To enter the sphere of existence itself, we must transcend the world of meaning. The tree does not precisely mean anything, does it? Vagina, hair, a beard, an eye, life, the body, underwear, shirts - what does it mean? These things are there, but they are not in the sphere of meaning. They are in another sphere, another dimension of our existence, which we gesture toward only as a kind of folly, until we become serious. Most people do not gesture toward the world of non-meaning very often, in the waking state at any rate. As spiritual practitioners, however, you indulge in the world of non-meaning constantly. To live a spiritual life is to be projected into the world of non-meaning - not meaninglessness, not negativity, but a sphere of Being that does not have anything to do with meaning. Being does not have anything fundamentally to do with the verbal mind. The verbal mind is a hatchet of decision, a declaration of assignation, of determination - Being has nothing to do with all of that. The sphere of Being is not unreal, it is simply a more fundamental, a more profound dimension of existence. It is a dimension in which we actually exist, without mind, without words, but really, tangibly, presently, personally. We exist there in the frame of non-meaning. What do we mean? What does "now" mean? Does God MEAN? It is a false question. It is absurd. Most fundamentally, we do not exist in the world of the verbal mind, or the world of meanings. We do not exist in the world of non-meaning in the sense that we exist in a world of negativity, of vacuity. We exist in a world that can be expressed only through the lift of an eyebrow, a hug, a kiss, a feeling. We cannot precisely define it. At least that is the way it seems to me. DA AVABHASA God is Not a Gentleman and I am That One Yee.