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]

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!