I have a few children’s books that are very precise about animals. Alina has learned to ask “what is that?” and expect an answer that is “real”: “thats a Northern Cardinal.” Some people feel really satisfied by knowing an animals “true” name. What I do when my daughter Alina demands something more than “thats a red bird” is “well people call it a Northern Cardinal, but this particular Northern Cardinal’s left leg is a little longer than his right, and there is no name for that.” Its like when Thich Nhat Hahn was asked by child “what color is that tree?” and his answer was “its the color that you see.” He explained that he didn’t want to replace the child’s experience of the tree with something else, a word, a concept. The Northern Cardinal visiting your yard is not a Northern Cardinal; it is the bird you see. The Buddha shrine is not an image of the Buddha. My Buddha statue in my house has a most unusual head, with a golden spike coming from the top and pointing up, and the rest of his head is black and knotted and bumpy, except for his face. If you forget it is an image of the Buddha, but an image of a human being not unlike yourself, you can learn a lot from this image. What can a bird or an ant teach you, about being a bird or an ant, if you forget what you think you know about them, like “what” they are by their name?

Look at a cockroach, for example. Imagine being a cockroach. Would you protect your life from a predator, and crawl below the surface of the sidewalk for shelter, even if it lead into the sewer? Of course you would, because you would think you’re life is good and worth protecting. This insight is not available to people who dismiss a cockroach with a technical name, or worse, try to kill them; both acts are ignorant. I invite you to pit yourself against the lives of cockroaches with all the conceptual knowledge necessary to kill as many as you can, and I hope after while you will see that the cockroach will find a shelter you cannot reach. It will survive all the names you give it, even “it”. For this, I am grateful to the cockroach.

Identity is important for logical reasoning. We have to have objects and identities for logical laws to be about something. Strangely, the laws themselves create the identities the laws are to be about, not the other way around. What I mean to say is, with the law of excluded middle (either it is p or it is not p): either a human is male or female, is a part of a human’s identity–  not because we went out and asked people what their identity was, but because logicians need us to be that simple, so they can depend on their logical laws, and publish what they think they know.

But the cost of the Law of excluded middle is a great cost. The knowledge we think we  gain is largely vapid and empty:

The law of excluded middle excludes every shade and color that can impress the soul. It is an about-face from any instructive experience that one could pay attention to. But the worst damage is the Law trivializes our thoughts into overly simple formulae.

The real number system has been painstakingly built and demonstrated logically because some people want to imagine that any point in space has a name. Maybe its name isn’t “one-third” or “0.2145…” exactly: you could make other sounds with your body’s inside noises. The point they want to make is that these points in space can be singled out with some name or other. If you would like to see how this attempt fails, I direct you to my essay Many Roads from the Axiom of Completeness (2013). The desire behind identity, regardless of what bodily inside noise you use to designate that identity, is extended here to other things besides numbers.

Also, it is good to be reminded that all the names we know are not any real kind of knowledge, even if one already knows that “in name”.

The woodpecker is a kind of borderline case because it is both a name and a description. Even for these types of names, seeing, hearing, smelling this woodpecker peck wood is real knowledge. The animals don’t need those names, they don’t need the name woodpecker to peck wood. People who like to watch or care for animals will already know a lot more about what its like to peck wood, and don’t need those names. Its the person who clings to this type of “knowledge” that needs them. People think they are doing a good thing, even an ethical thing, by calling each thing by their “proper name”. They can get rather righteous about it, but actually they are only clinging to an ill founded desire, or needing, to know names that that are of no consequence. The name Northern Cardinal is of no consequence. Recognizing this bird, its relationships to others you have seen, and understanding it, the way I tried to understand a cockroach above, this bird’s condition, way of behaving and expressing, regardless of what you decide to call it, that is real knowledge.

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Shrine

I have something to say
And the old words show a way
But the way I am bound
There are no words to be found.

Gotta unthink the unthinkable
A hope, another lie
Its a different point of view
The liar said he would fly, and then he flew.

Hard bind like a railroad line
Face the race and step out of place, yeah
Hear the bell rhyme
In the middle of your mind

Our poem crows a broken joy
That’s changed all its lines
So I built this shrine with the help of Father Time

 

Once I was speaking with my step-father and he told me about how the Buddha attempted to describe the size of an atom by comparing the sizes of things available to the senses, and multiplying that relative smaller size many times. My step-father was convinced that the Buddha knew the size of an atom and had got it in line with scientific knowledge on the subject. Whether or not Buddha got it right in this case I think is beside the point. The point is that the Buddha went no further than this. He described a smallest particle and asserted that it was smallest– atomic. This is not in line with the current scientific attitude. They find a smallest particle and then the race continues to find yet a smaller one.

I believe the Buddha stopped at his smallest particle and looked no further for purely ethical reasons. He was putting a limit over the domain that he would protect with his religion and his dhamma. He didn’t say so, but going further, or smaller, than his smallest particle, as an act of body, speech or mind, puts you outside his protection and his teaching.

Now we turn to the consequences of our splitting the atom– first with mind, then with speech, and finally with body, we put the entire world in danger of going up in flame. In our case, the Buddha’s teaching on heedfulness is in a sense largely unhelpful, because the fear and peril of nuclear war is paralyzing. And yet scientists seem to believe that continuing their inquiry further and further to ever smaller particles would somehow save us, rather than just put us in more danger. I don’t think scientists have anything reasonable on why their pursuits should not just put us in more danger. Danger of poisoning our water, our land, danger of WMD, pandemics. Quantum computers are great, but what about Quantum bombs? News treats scientific “progress” with wonderful possibilities for technologies, but rarely treats the way a new idea can be misused and misinterpreted to serve people who are less well-meaning than the truth-devoted ideal scientist. When will we stop uncritically allowing scientific ideas into our societies?

And the question may be put to the Sangha, whether the threat of nuclear war, which seems rather abstract involving particles I can’t see and causal relations between presidents and cultures of people I am removed from; whether this threat that I may at any time go up in flame or some of my friends may burn, or that my friends might feel the pain of their friends dying in fire, is relevant to the here and now? In other words, is it Dhamma; is it a real threat? Is fear of it justified? It may seem that we should just pay attention to what is before us and pretend that splitting subatomic particles just isn’t, in the present moment, a real problem. If we do that, and end up burning, should we look to our past karma as the cause, and not the strange modern predicament that we hear about on the news? It seems that this is a clear impasse between Buddhism and modern society, and that “what is relevant?” “What is Dhamma?” is actually in question, rather than immanently apparent.

There is no service in denouncing scientists for their actions in creating WMDs, nor is there service in finding fault in Buddhist doctrine in how it helps or hurts us in our current plight.

The serviceable question is what do we do now, that we have irrevocably put ourselves in such a danger that heedfulness, inquiry, and knowledge are no longer unequivocally good.

I believe what we should do is to inquire into where the ethical limits of our knowledge ought to be. Obviously, subatomic particles in isolation, as particles of an atom, should be recognized as an unethical idea. It does not matter if subatomic particles are “true” or “real.” Any lie is “real enough” or has some truth in it, otherwise it would not see the light of day. Realizing that any lie has truth in it is unhelpful, it is a realization that will do more harm than good, even though it is true. In the same sense, a subatomic particle is a terrible lie, or a harmful truth, and, as Buddha must have realized, we must set a boundary against inquiry in this direction. We have enough technology to feed us and care for us. What we need is the sanity to recognize we have enough food (and to start sharing it); to recognize how small is small enough, how much truth us truth enough (and how little truth constitutes a lie), how much heedfulness, inquiry and knowledge is enough, when to speak of truths, and when a truth should remain unspoken, and left outside our motivations for action. After all, using small technical words such as subatomic particle restricts our speech to only a vary small aspect of the world. In other words, it is more unreal than real, less about the world and more about something else.

The wisdom of the Buddha is seen most powerfully in recognizing when he chose to be silent. He was silent on all things except on how to end suffering for oneself. The time to thoughtfully and powerfully set limits on scientists’ ability to invade one’s own thought, speech and acts is overdue. The noises we make should not be an endless refinement of technical language on ever-refined “particles” or “quanta,” but noises that quiet the noise. The sound of the singing bowl is one such noise.

I believe my book is another such noise.