It's really interesting when you stumble through old (or even recent but forgotten) writing and see what you discover.

Look at me with eyes that wish to see the truth.
Look at me with eyes that will see me for who I truly am.
Look at me with the desire for honesty and compassion.
Look at me with the longing for connection.

Look at me as the man I am,
And I will look at you, always and forever,
As someone I can trust.

I'm really happy that I'm okay with who I am in my life now. There is no substitute for honesty, especially about oneself.

It would be very easy to get all philosophical with this next exposition. I am going to try and not do that. I am going to try really, really hard.

I was sent away from sanzen last week having been told to think on why lying is bad. Well, that's not entirely correct. Damn it! I already failed. The honest truth is, I don't actually remember exactly what I was supposed to work on, but it was about lying and the precepts. So, I just paraphrased and assembled what I thought was the gist of what I was told to do out of the information I did remember, knowing (hoping) that logic would most likely steer me right.

But is that a lie?

Interesting little tidbit before we slog on. That word above--"gist"--as in "to get the gist of something"? The etymology of that word is French, from the word gesir, and means "to lie"1. How very interesting that a word in common English meaning "to get to the kernel of something" is based on a word in another language for lying. We Englishers and our wacky language. We always break our toys, don't we? Anyway, back to the lie at hand.

The question "what is truth" has been a pop-hit in philosophy for a few thousand years. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it out this way:

A preliminary issue, although somewhat subsidiary, is to decide what sorts of things can be true. Is truth a property of sentences (which are linguistic entities in some language or other), or is truth a property of propositions (nonlinguistic, abstract and timeless entities)? The principal issue is: What is truth? It is the problem of being clear about what you are saying when you say some claim or other is true. The most important theories of truth are the Correspondence Theory, the Semantic Theory, the Deflationary Theory, the Coherence Theory, and the Pragmatic Theory. They are explained and compared here. Whichever theory of truth is advanced to settle the principal issue, there are a number of additional issues to be addressed:

1. Can claims about the future be true now?
2. Can there be some algorithm for finding truth – some recipe or procedure for deciding, for any claim in the system of, say, arithmetic, whether the claim is true?
3. Can the predicate "is true" be completely defined in other terms so that it can be eliminated, without loss of meaning, from any context in which it occurs?
4. To what extent do theories of truth avoid paradox?
5. Is the goal of scientific research to achieve truth?

...and blah, and more blah, etc. Philosophy is great like that. The big question can really be distilled down to this very simple question: can we ever know the truth?

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle stated “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”. So, essentially, to say something false of the truth is to lie, while to say something true of the truth is to state a truth. I would so have been busted in Phi-101 for that. But this is the trouble with philosophy down at the macro-scale. You often trip yourself up by defining your terms with the terms you're trying to define. Socrates', Plato's and Aristotle's arguments about truth generally all boil down to this sort-of sticky distillation, in philosophy referred to as correspondence theory, and while pretty snazzy back in 380BCE, now notsomuch. It's still one of the foundation pilliars of Epistemology, but it's no real answer by itself.

And that's the trouble/point/gist: philosophy (any school or sect of it that you wish to hook your cart to) really still doesn't have a handle on this whole "truth" business. I mean, we have a few decent working theories, and people that came later, like Kant, Hegel, Sartre, et al, tried their best to wrestle this beast to the ground and put a cute break-away collar on it, but in the end, all failed (which is good, because that's what keeps philosophers in business: the failure of previous philosophers!) For me, a few got closer than others. Søren Kierkegaard, through his Johannes Climacus character, famously stated "Truth is Subjectivity". Now, this is often mistaken as meaning "It's true because I believe it to be so," but that is very not the case. Kierkegaard was hitting upon something much more subtle (and frankly, profound) than that. He was saying that an objective approach to personal truth can never actually get to the important bit of it--the gist, if you will--for the person investigating a given question. Essentially, he is saying that dumbing down things to simple objects, mere 1's and 0's, is just as full of fail as saying "It is too a flying purple people eater, because I believe it is, and you can't prove me wrong!" Kierkegaard allows that at times, and in certain pursuits (science, math, history, gin rummy) it is useful to call a spade a spade. However, if you do, you do so with the understanding and acceptance that the result obtained, while practical and generally representative of the truth, cannot ever be a full and total representation of the truth; it can only be a concensus opinion, and that's not all that damn helpful when it comes to figuring out your life. It would seem that the truth is relative, and not only relative, but dependent upon the senses and intellects of others. Danger, Will Robinson!

So using philosophy is fraught with gopher-holes when figuring out this truth -vs- lying issue.

Ahhh... philosophy. Remember when I said that I promsed not to go there?

Here's my problem. Well, in my opinion, it's not just my problem, it's all of ours, especially when it comes down to this issue. We, as smrt monkeys, tend to go to philosophy a lot when it comes to issues like this. And, as is rather predictable of me, I fell for it really quickly. We hear a philosophical-ish question, and immediately the intellect kicks in and says "Wait! I have this one! Stand back!" I have now prattled on for a goodly number of keystrokes with regards to "what is truth", when, in fact, that wasn't even the question. The question is "why is not lying important with regards to the Five Precepts?" I find it very interesting that while the two seem to hold hands rather nicely, they are very different, and are actually not even related.

The Precepts tend to be looked at as Buddhist "commandments" although they are very far from that in the Judeo-Christian sense. Vowing to abstain from taking life, stealing, misusing sexual energy, speaking falsely or consuming things to purpously cloud the mind, while seemingly obvious, are a bit more nuanced than merely being "good rules to live by". The Precepts all lead the person taking them towards a single, unified idea that can be looked at as being the core, the kernel, of not only a Buddhist life, but of all lives. They all are vows that will lead to a skillful life. Now, one could argue that other religions have commandments or precepts that do the same, and while that may be true in places, for the most part, none are as stream-lined as these ideas that the Buddha laid down. And since I'm a buddhist, and this is a question from a buddhist to a buddhist about buddhism, we'll play with that ball and bat.

Reaching back up to Kierkegaard, we see and take as read that objectifying things cannot get us to the truth, and fully subjectifying everything just leaves us in a state of self-delusion. If that is the case, then what is the harm in lying? What is the harm in, say, telling her those pants make her ass look big, or that his father wasn't the milk-man? What difference does it make? That really is the question. It's not "why is lying wrong". It's not "why is telling the truth right". The question is really "what the hell does it matter?"

When examining existence, when inquiring into the nature of reality, we must presuppose something, and that is the validity of our experience inside that very phenomena we refer to as "existence". We must assume "our self" in order to inquire. However, if one does not inquire, but simply experiences, there is no assumption that need be made. And in order to experience, one must be willing to cast off all unskillful habits and actions, because nothing true ever comes from that which is unskillful.

You'll often hear "No good ever comes from lying" but that, too, is a wrong view. Whoever said that certainly wasn't answering the door while Anne Frank and family were hiding in the attic. Seems pretty skillful to me. So, take the external effect of lying out of the picture for a minute. Why? Well, the external really isn't a very useful way (as the Frank illustration shows) of measuring things, is it? This lying thing must be about something greater than just this observable external phenomenal world and our interactions with it. We use our senses to take in that world, but our senses are often wrong, so we can't really use them as a basis for any kind of sure measure of reality. All we really have that we can know is that which we can experience.

Unlike the truth (or The Truth, whichever you prefer) which appears to be an external thing, standing upon high, glowing with some ethereal majesty, lying is an action. Lying is a choice we make. To lie is to chose illusion over reality. To lie is to want that which is unreal. To lie is to take a step away from what we really, truly are, because we are, by nature, full of the right stuff. That stuff is the stuff of skillful action. That stuff is the want of peace and non-suffering. That stuff is reality. And unskillful action is never about reality. Unskillful action is never about the Truth. Unskillful action is always rooted in ignorance of the truth, and attachment to the ego. Therefore, to lie, to willfuly choose unreality over reality, is simply unskillful means, and will never, ever result in a closer, more genuine experience of the Dharma.

Kierkegaard was getting close. You can never have a theory of the truth, just the experience of it. But as he was getting the objective and subjective to do an interesting two-step, he was still in a dualistic dance. In the end, though, the Nazis were still a-knockin'.

The short-form to all this nonsense above is this:

• Not all "not-truths" are lies.
• Not all truths are Truths.
• All lies are not the True Dharma.
  
• To lie is to not be out of touch with our true selves.
• We ARE the truth.

Simply put, your mama was right: when you lie, you only hurt yourself. However, when you understand that "yourself" actually equals "all of us", it's a bigger fail than you may have anticipated. We either all develop mad skillfulness, or nobody gets to the other side of the river. It's all or nothing. No lie...

I'm gonna have to get back to this post, because to me it's still scattered, and frankly, like my understanding, needs fine-tuning.

“When we discover that the truth is already in us, we are all at once our original selves.”

-Dogen

How nice to have two Sundays in a row that greet me with sun. Honestly, I feel like it's spoiling me. Alas; leave it to my good friend Mpeterson to muck up my perfectly quiet Sunday with a question. Well, I did ask for it...

Buddhists spend lots of time yakking about "dharma". The origination of the word (Sanskrit: dhárma, Pāḷi dhamma) means "that which supports or upholds", and often gets translated into "law". And in this case, by "translated" I mean "dumbed-down". And by "dumbed-down" I, of course, mean "neutered".

In Buddhism, we often refer to the Dharma as a "jewel". I have always really liked this interpretation not only because it implies its preciousness, but also the multi-faceted nature of this treasure. So let's get out our magnifying glasses and have a look-see.

On one hand, we do look at the "dharma" as "law". We look at it as the laws by which reality is governed. And, as part of reality, we are governed by it as well. All the scientific and merely gross aspects of reality--from macro to micro and all points in between--are subject to the dharma, because the dharma is all that is. Essentially; "reality is the law, and the law is reality". That's pretty easy to wrap ones' head 'round. Even if we as individuals don't understand the laws of the Universe, we can sort of always feel them at work (sort of like tax law, I suppose). So, to start with, [dharma] ≈ [law]. To take it one step further to the East, it could very easily be interpreted as [dharma] ≈ [Tao].

If we turn the jewel, the next shiny side is the dharma as the cannon of teaching from Śākyamuni Buddha. In Buddhism, this is referred to as "Buddha-dharma". I won't elaborate on that too much, except to say that on the surface, this is what most people experience or think of as "dharma" at first in much the same way as a Christian employs the word "gospel" to refer to the direct and (supposed) near-literal cannon of teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded by the Fab Four (Matt, Mark, Luke and John). So [Buddha-dharma] ≈ [gospel].

Turned again, we get "Dharma" as the literal essence of truth as embodied and personified by the Buddha. This is referred to as Dharmakāya, or "the unmanifested, 'inconceivable' aspect of a Buddha" (or "self-realized enlightened Being") out of which all Buddhas and all "phenomena" arise and to which they return after their dis-integration.1 This is also analogous to "gospel" insofar as "gospel" literally translates as "the 'good news'" and means both "the saving teachings of Jesus--The Christ" as well as the concept that the physical phenomena that was Jesus the Nazarene was both the literal "good word" as well as the "'Word' of the Trinity". So [Dharmakāya] ≈ [Logos].

Flip the jewel around some more (oooo, purdy!) and we finally spot the shiny side that is the phenomenological. "Dharma" is looked at as "a phenomenon or constituent factor of human experience". So here, [dharma] ≈ [phenomena].

Finally (and absurdly briefly) "Dharma" does mean all of these things at once, and yet, at the same time, means nothing in-and-of-itself. That is because while "dharma" does in fact have implied a priori components (if I do this, that will happen, and that is obvious without the doing, also called karma) it also demands the experiential, or a posteriori, and as such brings with it the notion of qualia, which gets left in the dust with mere a priori approaches. "Dharma" does not stand outside of "us" as a self-perpetuating concept: it is never a mere construct. It is always manifest in every moment, always true, never false, and while it may often be inconceivable, is always accessible. So, essentially I'm hazarding to say that [dharma] ~ [noumena].

So, to the question:

"...is 'dharma' best said to be 'truth' or is it the "form"....which, to unenlightened consciousness seems to be the full truth, although to a more awakened consciousness comes to be understood as the form containing the emptiness which is its true 'truth'?"

Right.

First off, this question insinuates that any consciousness can be "unenlightened", or that there are states of consciousness that are lacking in direct experience. That's really walking on Jello, but whatever.

It's my understanding (and I really hesitate to use that word) that, in the context that I was employing it, "dharma" is better defined as "phenomena/nounema" I guess. Maybe "reality". Hmmm. How about "catfish"?

Fail.

The Buddha said: "All dharmas are marked by emptiness; they neither arise nor cease, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor decrease."

So, saying "the form containing the emptiness which is its true 'truth'" is like saying "the form containing the emptiness that is the form that is the emptiness..." [+ ad infinitum]. I suppose that it is also akin to saying "the cup that contains the emptiness that together equals 'cup-ness'." Once more, with Kantian feeling: the phenomena containing the noumena. But of course, in Kant's world, a phenomena can't contain a noumena, or it would be like saying "the merely noumenal", and as we know, Kant's "categories of understanding" could never get the noumena and the phenomena in the same room experientially, so where we're headed must be rather un-Kantian. Smell the whiff of set theory in the air?

That which one can "know" -vs- that which one can "experience" may be vastly different, but they are not in full opposition, and are by no means antithetical (and to a Buddhist, quite the contrary), and therein lies the friction. Kant was still operating (mired?) in the Cartesian paradigm of dichotomy; of duality, of "this" versus "that". Ontologically, this started to fall apart when Schopenhauer started picking on him for being too quick and loose in redefining "noumena" to fit his model of experience as he went along, while at the same time still allowing the "Cartesian other" to keep drawing breath. Later, George Herbert Mead started steering dangerously towards Buddhism with his critique of the "other", saying "we do not assume there is a self to begin with. Self is not presupposed as a stuff out of which the world arises. Rather the self arises in the world." Woo! Goosebumps!

Buddhists don't see a separation between "this" and "that". We have just "this", over and over and over. There is no duality. There is no dichotomy. There is no "mind -vs- body" because you can't separate the two no matter how hard you try and at the same time be experiential as the "one" trying to do the separating, and we are, at our base, nothing if not experiential. ("Nothing" if not experiential! I kill me sometimes...) Anyways, one cannot get a distance between the two in order for one to objectify the other. All we "are" is reoccurring experience. All we are is Pǔ. All we are is Tao. All that is is Tao. If you try and take the Tao apart, you have nothing. Yet the Tao is always empty. Yet everything is held within it. It is a perpetual vessel that in its emptiness holds everything. Again, pǔ.

So, honestly, set theory is probably the realm that can put this on paper best.

Form IS Emptiness. Emptiness IS Form. Phenomena IS Noumena. Noumena IS Phenomena. Neither term is antithetical. Neither term is in opposition. And while is is most likely safe to interpret "dharma" as "phenomena" for the sake of argument, in doing so, one MUST also interpret it as "noumena" at the same time for the sake of a complete representation of the paradigm, or else you break the Tao and are just left with nothing.

So, [dharma] = {}.

I got nuthin'...