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.