Sakyamuni's Shadow Puppets

As I tend to go off on rants about topics that interest me, and as these topics tend to be varied and scattered, I realize I lose a lot of would-be readers at the first few sentences, quite possibly even at the title. So I will try to follow the Wikipedia model: provide hyperlinks to ideas that many be needlessly obscure or technical, like sakyamuni (or, as some write it, shakyamuni). I hope that dispels some confusion, because I'm prone to sow it. And people should call me on it, because I get too excited too easily.

The title of this post was something that popped out in one of those insane automatic writing sessions that I highly recommend for everyone. In them you should write whatever comes to mind as quickly or as slowly or as awkwardly as you can. If you feel like it, eschew the constraints of grammar: go all impressionist, or replace periods with semicolons or intentionally use the wrong verb tenses; verb nouns and noun verbs freely, because the human linguistic mind is bigger than the artificial constraints of any one language's idiosyncrasies. If you don't already speak another language, playing with the language you have makes you realize this profound truth: sense is not the same as grammar. I strongly believe that after a while automatic writing becomes a "spiritual" experience, in a way very similar to what happens when a trained athlete reaches "flow", or when a musiciam performs a piece they have practiced well, or when someone manages to still their mind even for a little while, as with meditative practice. I say this because I have been in all these situations (except for the trained athlete) and there is a hard-to-describe residuum of similarity between all these brain-states (or, if you like, mind-states; I, for one, put little faith in their distinctness). Vagueness will, as always, have to do. The best way to test what I have written is to try it out yourself.

But I have not even gotten to the original idea that spurned this post: the idea of Sakyamuni's shadow puppets. If you bothered to skim the webpage I linked above, you will no doubt notice there is a lot of metaphysical talk about the Buddha's (that is, Sakyamuni's) supreme enlightenment and how the sun and moon and all the animals stopped, presumably in admiration etc., etc. This, to many, is Buddhism-as-religion, Buddhism-as-doctrine. If you look at the byline to this weblog, you will see that one of the adjectives I chose to use is "buddhist". I did not do this with Buddhism-the-religion in mind, but with what many consider a "weaker" position: buddhism as practical philosophy, a way of reducing anxieties and stresses, a way to produce insight into our own condition and creativity to deal with it. I am not opposed to the idea of enlightenment, but that is a word that gets bandied around a lot, and whenever a word gets thrown around, the profound interdependence of the word on a myriad of other concepts gets thrown out in many minds. I think we have to move in baby steps: if we are to realize that the self-other distinction is an illusion, we need some insight into this "self", this smokescreen of concepts that ties us into suffering and joy. Now, this is a practical path, but it seems lessened somehow, likened to the shadow the magnificent form of the Enlightened One casts on some dreadful wall. But this is, in my opinion, where we must start, unless we want to get overwhelmed. (Someone will, I'm sure, notice some sort of analogy to Plato's Cave, and this is not at all unintentional.) I think in the end Sakyamuni would have liked this comparison, because in my mind he would have been fond of a game, and making shadow puppets to entertain the populace would have been something he'd have liked to do. But this entertainment is not just sntertainment: I remember to me shadow puppets always carried a sense of wonder, a sense that there is something mysterious in all this. And that is exactly how we should approach life; if enlightenment exists, we can't push for it with out head in the metaphysical clouds, or with supplications, or with mantras, or with a sense of progression: we must play, as Sakyamuni surely played.

Consider: "Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts."