An Answer to the Koan

[sdi]

If you identify with your body, then everyone is separate from you. If you identify with your soul, then everyone is your brothers and sisters. If you identify with the Intellect, then everyone is you. If you identify with the One, then there is nobody at all, not even you.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

This one has struck something with me, particularly that last bit—I'm not sure I entirely agree, but then it's something I've got to meditate on some more.

But my reasoning is mathematical more than anything else. I know Edward Butler's polycentric take on Proclean metaphysics stresses the recondite nature of The One (almost, IMHO, to the breaking point), but this would suggest that The One is 0, which for me always means "The Void," an absence. I associate The One with 1 itself—unity, in that this number is part of all numbers, with the exception (?) of 0 (which, in spite of modern insinuations, I don't regard as a number, but rather as absence).

But that's about the full extent of my thinking on this subject, for now. Good thought-provoking post.

[sdi]

The One sure is weird! One can absolutely regard it as both everything and nothing. This post was kinda a meditation on applying Neoplatonist answers to Zen questions, and in Zen the Void is the top of the chain, so that's why I went that route for this post. You can go the other way, too, but I do think it's important to try to grasp both (insofar as one can!) so one doesn't get caught up in models. (Both are wrong, after all! "The Tao that can be spoken of isn't the eternal Tao.")

If you want more food for meditation, Plotinus has two models of number: in one model, the One is one, the Intellect is two, the Soul is three, and Nature is four; in the other model, the One is the entire number line, the Intellect is one, and all the other natural numbers are the various souls. What I think is interesting is, in the second model, division is how you go "up" the chain of being: a composite, when divided, yields its primes; a prime, when divided, yields one (the Intellect); and one, when divided, yields only itself (the Intellect is the top of existents). In that sense, zero does kinda work as the One—you can't divide by zero, because doing so in a sense yields all numbers all at once. (Nonetheless, it's still kinda weird and you have to add a whole mess of special-case axioms to make it work. I'm with you that zero isn't really a number, just like "infinity" isn't a number—it's just a placeholder concept.)

(If you want even more food for meditation, the Pythagoreans had lots of models for how to apply numbers to the metaphysical realms and I'm frankly having a lot of trouble trying to understand and reconcile them all. The Theology of Arithmetic seems to be the go-to source here, and skimming it was fun, but it's gonna take me ages to unpack it.)

Still, either way, these are all just models that are intended to help point the way. The One, the Intellect, etc. aren't really numbers any more than I'm a fish. It's interesting and perhaps instructive to consider but I don't think it's good to get too hung up on it. I'm really glad you found it food for thought!

(And goodness, I'm not sure I'll ever understand Butler. Even Thomas Taylor is easier to read than he is! Still, I'll have to hazard another attempt sometime...)

[boccaderlupo]

I can say definitively I don't think we've even scratched the surface of The One (nor will we ever, I suspect).

I'm no mathematician, by any stretch, but I like the idea of the immanence of 1: if you multiply any number by it, you get that selfsame number, never 1. And yet 2 is 1 + 1, and 3 is 1 + 1 + 1, and seven million is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 (you get it)... It's it that model where I glimpse a sense of both the immanence and transcendence of The One—non-dual, as is were—which is in every thing, but when one looks at a particular thing, we only regard that thing, and can only get a sense of the primordial unity via noetic contemplation.

I have not dug into Pythagoreanism enough, and will take that reference as a recommendation...

Axé

[sdi]

Your original reply—critiquing the notion that the One is the Void—tickled something in my mind and it took some digging to find it again.

101 Zen Stories LXXXII says,

Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku.

Desiring to show his attainment, he said: "The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received."

Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.

"If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this anger come from?"

:)

[boccaderlupo]

Ha ha! Somehow these stories end up with someone getting smacked. Very good!