Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism by Brook A. Ziporyn

Author:Brook A. Ziporyn
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

YOU ARE A FLOATING FINGER

Here’s a helpful way to visualize and intuit these ideas. Hold your two index fingers about six inches in front of your eyes. Stare beyond them, focusing on the wall in the background. Now pull your fingertips apart slightly. Do you see a little sausage of a double-tipped finger floating there in the air? It should have a fingernail on each end (fig. 8.1.) That is what a “separate entity” is like in the Tiantai universe. It is, in your present purview, located “between” two other entities, your two index fingers. It is separate from them; it is “another” entity. But actually it is made entirely of those other entities that border and surround it, duplicated in a new form, encapsulated into a little packet of floating sausage. The left end of the finger on the right is superimposed over the right end of the finger on the left, and the result is a new entity, a double-ended finger, floating in the middle. This is the category mistake of all our ordinary experience. We see each thing as a separate entity, arrayed among a panorama of other mutually exclusive entities. But actually each one is all the ones around it, substantiated in our vision through a particular crimp of our vision. And you yourself—you are just such a floating sausage too. What you feel as your body, your mind, as a little self-enclosed packet of existence is actually the whole world around them, folded back into a superimposed illusion. The contents of the sausage are the same as what surrounds the sausage. It points out toward what points back at it, but what points toward it is itself pointing outward toward all else. You are the world, but in this uniquely crisscrossed, inverted form, the top transferred to the bottom and the bottom to the top, inside out. Pause for a few minutes and try to feel yourself as this floating finger, folding the entire universe into the inverted form of “you.”

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