[MD] MOQ/BOC

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Krimel <Krimel at krimel.com> wrote:
> Dan,
> Glad to see you checking into Taoist literature. I have never read the I
> Ching in detail because it just seems like a catalog of hexagrams and a
> process of divination and neither of those interest me much. But the history
> and import of these practices I find completely revealing with regard to the
> MoQ. It shows the underlying metaphysics of the metaphysics underling both
> Zen and the MoQ.

Hi Krimel
I often attend retreats at a center in Pecatonica, just east of
Rockford, IL. A group of real estate investors donated a simply
stunning few hundred acres of land to the center. There are a number
of areas that could be put under cultivation but for periodic
floodings that ruin any crops they've tried to plant there.

I live just north of Mendota, IL, the location of the largest field
tile manufacturer in the world. I noticed they had these huge rolls of
tile sitting around outside so one day I stopped by and asked if they
might have any factory seconds or throw-aways that I could buy on the
cheap. The man asked why, was I a farmer? I said, no, its for a
Buddhist meditation center. And much to my surprise, he ended up
giving me this huge roll of field tile, roughly 2000 feet.

So last fall I drove it up and though we hoped at that time to perhaps
bury it the weather was foul. It finally dried out enough by July that
we could dig. Now, they have these really neat machines that dig a
trench, bury the tile, and cover it up all in one motion. We didn't
have one of those. But we did have shovels.

Tong is a lay monk who emigrated from Vietnam back in the seventies.
We talk quite a lot; I talk more to him than anyone there. He is about
my age but I feel like a child around him. He actually lives at a
center in Bloomington, IN,, but he always seems to be in Pecatonica
when I visit. He and I buried every foot of that tile by hand, digging
trenches some 3 feet deep in spots.

One day, out of the blue, he asked me: What is your philosophy, Dan.
It was more of a statement than a question, at least I took it that
way. I said: Quality. He just looked at me and smiled and bent back to
his digging.

That evening, he brought out this stick. And he unrolled some kind of
paper, a scroll, only not like anything I ever saw. He layed it out
carefully on the table and beckoned me to look with a wave of his
hand: This is the Book of Changes, he told me. It is a copy of a copy
of a copy that goes back many thousands of years.

I was fascinated. Even though it was written in figures completely
unlike our alphabet, I could understand it. Bird's feet, rain drops,
wind, mountains, all these things I know. And it wasn't written in ink
on paper... the material was like cloth but not really and the writing
seemed in different colors as if the artist might have selected
special berries for just the correct effect.

So here I am, a 21st century Midwest American, reading and
comprehending a Chinese document written 4000 years ago! Quite a
fascinating experience.

But yes, I know Jung had quite the fasination with the BOC as well.

Thank you,

Dan


>
> Here is Carl Jung on the subject from his introduction to the 1949 Wilhelm
> translation:
>
> "The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know now
> that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and thus must
> necessarily allow for exceptions. We have not sufficiently taken into
> account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in
> order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we leave
> things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is
> partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under
> natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific
> laws is almost an exception."
>
> What Jung could not have foreseen is that it was not causality that turned
> out to be threatened by recent findings but, prediction. The world can be
> perfectly deterministic and yet still unpredictable. The search for truths,
> as it turns out, has always been a search for "merely statistical truths".
> The search for invariable natural laws was merely a search for truths that
> apply 100% of the time. Now we are happy when they apply at above chance
> levels.
>
> Here's more Jung:
>
> "The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be
> exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call
> coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we
> worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. We must admit that there is
> something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable
> amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance
> or danger represented by chance."
>
> See, in Taoist thought, Shit happens and it up to us to guess what kind of
> shit will happen next. Behavioral economists in the present era claim that
> we have a sense of probability like our senses of time and space. We
> perceive the odds and act on our estimates. Divination, ritual, religion,
> philosophy and science are all just ways of hedging our bets.
>
> More from Jung:
>
> "This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed
> synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically
> opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth
> and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve
> one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in
> space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a
> peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as
> with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers."
>
> I would spin this a bit differently than Jung. Events in space and time have
> no "meaning" on their own. Meaning is something we introduce. Meaning is
> reduction in uncertainty or the product of our sense of probability.
>
> More Jung:
>
> " In other words, whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the
> hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality
> no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in
> which it was cast -- even more so than the hours of the clock or the
> divisions of the calendar could be -- inasmuch as the hexagram was
> understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the
> moment of its origin."
>
> In other words the I Ching diviner sees Chaos like the weather. As a kind of
> convergence of the currents of time and circumstance that pervade the world
> moment to moment. Casting yarrow sticks is like wetting your finger to see
> which way the wind is blowing.
>
> The I Ching is a very ancient work. Parts of it date to before 1000 B.C.. As
> I have suggested if we want an ancient lineage for the history of the MoQ,
> the Greeks were still learning how to count while the Chinese were setting
> to stage for a metaphysics of Chaos that still finds application in the
> modern world.
>
> Krimel
>
>
>
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