the times went over to the dark side around the turn of the century, but they were always a willing tool of the power elite. occasionally i still brush up against their paywall, and laugh to myself, you actually charge people for this shit?
at 15 i wandered out of the art and architecture room and pulled two books off the shelf, either/or and being and nothingness. i looked through them, and concluded, without much effort, we got nothing. the obit of western philosophy, among other things the final arbiter to the truth claims put forward by the scientific method, was published in 1987, in after philosophy. all the bigs attended the funeral, including habermas, the master blaster of the critical school, marx must have hung his head and cried.
at 18 i read the confucian masterworks, staring at facsimilies of the calligraphy on the stone pillars in beijing. in the analects, i saw my life flash forward: at 15 i wanted to learn, at 30 i had a foundation, at 40 a certitude, at 50 knew the orders of heaven, at 60 was ready to listen to them. at 70 i could follow my own heart’s desire without barking up the wrong tree.
braudel was the confucius of the west. in the 80s he correctly forecast that, right about now, china would be the center of the global economy. someone asked him though, whether he thought that, in a postmodern world, the nature of the structural stratification at the heart of materialist analysis might change. he said, as much as i might like to see that, the whole point of my analysis is that that is unlikely.
braudel was like hakuin, an enlightened master with no successors. although the annales historians are called a school, no one who came later could do what he did. hakuin’s best boy, torei, wrote a book called the undying lamp of zen, distilling his lifetime of practice under the greatest teaching master japan has ever known. he gave it to hakuin for review, hakuin hung his head and said, please add a postscript quoting ming-pen.
the dutiful torei wrote: so it is that our school only esteems the work of right mindfulness and does not esteem models of conduct or forms of practice. this means that when right mindfulness is continuous, you still don’t consider it enough when the nature of reality becomes apparent. when right mindfulness is continuous and you cultivate the path to complete maturity, you still don’t consider that enough. when right mindfulness is continuous and you go beyond the buddhas and ancestors, you are free to act unconventionally or conventionally as expedient, giving and taking independently.
still stuck in words, and a thousand miles away himself, but doing the best he can, he quotes an old timer: when you let go, even the rubble in the wall radiates light.
china has, by design, eliminated conventional poverty based on oppressive stratification. that’s not the end, that’s the beginning, but braudel must be smiling at what he missed.
ch’eng-ku said, if you manage to enter in by the way of the ancient masters, that will be like a hundred thousand suns and moons, liberating all sentient beings in the universe. if you enter into verbal teachings, that will be like the light of a firefly, and you won’t even be able to save yourself. why? because it is still sterile wisdom. detach from literal knowledge and look into yourself.
householder zen 