From: esot@troi.cc.rochester.edu (Eric Sotnak)
Newsgroups: rec.martial-arts
Subject: Re: Meaning?
Date: 7 Apr 92 20:25:45 GMT
Distribution: rec
Organization: University of Rochester (Rochester, NY)

Ed Liu writes:

}   One answer that I have for the question comes out of a seminar I took in Zen
}Buddhism.  In Zen, the idea of a division between mind and body, one of the
}most important philosophical questions in western philosophy, is ridiculous.
}To Zen practicioners, there is NO distinction between your mind and your body.

  Well, this isn't entirely true.  It depends very much on which Zen
Buddhist literature you are looking at.
  There is, for example, the notion in Zen that one ought to LOCATE the
mind in the lower abdomen.  Sometimes the texts seem to indicate that
there is really some thing (the mind) that gets located in the lower
abdomen by means of one's act of attention, although sometimes it seems
that locating the mind is just a matter of focussing one's attention.
  Then, too, there are Zen texts which borrow from such other Buddhist
traditions as yogacara, which says that only mind exists.  Here there is
no distinction between mind and body, but only because body is subsumed
under mind.
  There are also references in Zen to the body as a "skin-bag."  The
"bag" in question here contains more than just blood, guts and bones, it
also contains the mind.  The containment metaphor here wouldn't work
unless some sort of distinction between mind and body were being
supposed.
  Then there are the classical Zen metaphors for mind: light, the
mirror, the moon in the water, empty space.  These are metaphors for
mind, not for the body.  Again, a distinction at least seems presupposed
if not explicitly recognized.
  Finally, it must be pointed out that Chinese and Japanese have
distinct characters for mind and body (though the characters for "mind"
don't quite mean the same as "mind"), and that these characters were not
used interchangeably by Zen Buddhists.
  It is true that one does not find the radical sort of separation
between mind and body that one finds in, for example, Descartes, where
mind and body are distinct substances, but I think it is not quite right
to assert that Zen Buddhists did not distinguish between mind and body
at all.  Neither, however, did all Western philosophers.  Various Idealist
philosophers in the West have held positions remarkably like yogacara.
Then, too, there are thoroughgoing materialists like Hobbes, d'Holbach,
and Bertrand Russell.
  I'm not even fully convinced that classical Zen Buddhists would have
found the distinction between mind and body ridiculous if it had been
proposed to them.  They would, however, almost certainly have found it
singularly uninteresting.  Zen, in conformity with Buddhist tradition,
is concerned with liberation, not metaphysics.  Mind and body both exist
in thoroughgoing interdependence with causal and constitutive
conditions, and are therefore empty (of self-nature or individual
essence).  In this respect, at least, there is no distinction between
them, but neither is there any distinction anywhere to be made with
respect to the emptiness of things.

}If you accept this, then you can conclude that if your body is stable, your
}mind will be stable and vice versa.  So, if you are sitting in a very stable
}position, then meditation becomes that much more effective -- your body's own
}stability is aiding your mind's stability.
[..]

--
********************************************************************
Eric Sotnak                   |  One life.
esot@uhura.cc.rochester.edu   |  One chance.