Dynamite Finger

Mind Training – Step One

Today we added an element to the observation of the breath. We began by observing the in breath and the out breath, with our attention at the point on the upper lip or the nostrils, where we feel the motion of the air as we breath. 

Today we added awareness of the length of the breath. Long or short. We notice the sensation of the air moving in and out. We notice if our breaths are long, as they are when we get started, or if they are short, as they usually become as we settle down. Once in a while we take a deep breath and notice, it is long. It is simple to describe. It is simple to practice. It makes it easy to cultivate awareness in the present moment. This is an essential skill for doing anything well. 

Building on a foundation of a mind made strong and calm by a habit of good moral and ethical conduct, we develop concentration in mind training practice. That concentration and the mindfulness that leads to it are pleasurable, serene states of mind. But we do not do them simply to enjoy them. We use our tranquility to examine our mind and our experience. We get a deep look at our minds at work, becoming more able to recognize and encourage wholesome states and discourage harmful ones, even when they are subtle or fleeting. 

We may begin to notice the degree to which we use language to build our world, interpret our experience and choose our courses of action.

Language conveys information from mind to mind.

The words we use are like the arrows on a diagram. The arrows themselves don’t mean anything. They direct our attention. 

If the object a word points to is not clearly defined then the word will not communicate clearly. 

To use an analogy: language is to our training as music theory is to music. 

Language is useful. But words cannot capture and convey the things they are pointing to. You have to share experience to understand the words.

In martial arts training we use kata to represent and communicate combative technique. It is as easy to misinterpret as words are. For the same reason. The representation is not the thing represented.  

Bruce Lee pointed this out in his movie Enter the Dragon. He used a simile:

“It’s like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”

In the scene he says this to his disciple, rebuking him for imitating the form of the technique while missing its combative intention. The Chinese audience would recognize the simile. They may not have known its source: in the 5^th century, it was introduced in China by Zen school, as presented in the Lankavatara Sutra:

“…when a man with his finger-tip points at something to somebody, the finger-tip may be taken wrongly for the thing pointed at…”

The “finger and the moon” simile is about the distinction between language and experience. With characteristically harsh Zen language the Lankavatara continues:

“…the people belonging to the class of the ignorant and simple-minded… are unable even unto their death to abandon the idea that in the finger-tip of words there is the meaning itself…”

Centuries later the Shurangama Sutra picked up the theme:

“It is like when someone points his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, that person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why? It is because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.”

The center of Zen school discourse is skeptical awareness of the limits of language. Zen defines itself as “a tradition beyond words”; as “a separate transmission outside the scriptures.” 

In the 20^th century modernist discourse picked up the crucial distinction between the signifier and the signified. Magritte’s famous meme-like painting of a pipe is inscribed with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” – This Is not a pipe.

As martial artists doing mind training, we are familiar with the ambiguity that arises when we use language to share experience. Words of instruction may communicate little when you first hear them and try to follow them, but after some experience, the same instruction will succinctly bring to mind what we are doing or trying to do. 

Lawyers and diplomats depend on the ambiguity and plasticity of language, writing declarations all parties can accept, but which all can interpret differently. They get an agreement, without agreeing. They pay dearly for their deception. 

As MacBeth’s soaring deception collapses he abandons all hope. His life seems to him:

“…a tale told by an idiot, 

filled with sound and fury, 

signifying nothing.” 

It seems that being a decent person beats titanic aspirations. But that takes work. 

On the wall of our dojo hangs a scroll that reads “Damatte Keiko”. “Shut up and train.” It is there as a reminder that we become proficient through practice. Words can be most helpful when used sparingly. 

Learning is encumbered when an instructor tries to convert his conception of the movement, with all its components, into words, requiring the student then to interpret the description, select the important parts, and try to manifest what they think they have understood from the instructor’s words, in movement. This is needlessly complex. It burdens the process. But more significantly, the words cannot capture the meaning of the movement. They can at best point to an approximation of it. It works better for the student to watch the instructor and copy the technique.

The finger pointing at the moon simile makes the point explicitly – do not be distracted by language, do not mistake representation for the thing it is intended to point to. The simile also recognizes that we do need to use language.

From Zengo Nyumon by Kusumoto Bun’yu (1907-1995) Translated by Michael D. Ruymar:

“When Kukai returned from China to Japan he said: “the Dharma is beyond speech, but without speech it cannot be revealed. Suchness transcends forms, but without depending on forms it cannot be realized. Though one may at times err by taking the finger pointing at the moon to be the moon itself, we rely upon the Buddha’s teachings which guide us…” 

Conflating the designation and the thing designated is an issue. But not the only one that makes language a moving target. 

The thing designated is not understood the same way by everyone. The object, whatever it may be that we are talking about at a given moment, does not have the same place in each person’s life. Even our own understanding of the object is in continual flux, as we interact with it, as we learn, as we change, as we experience other things. And at the same time, the object designated is also changing. This set of changing conditions is infinitely complex. But it is not random. 

That is the crucial point: It is precise, it is meaningful, it can be known, and we can use it to transcend the mundane and fulfill our potential.

Multiple Perspectives in Space

Our understanding of the object to which a word points is not based on a snapshot impression of the object. It has been built. If you look at a house, for example, seeing it for the first time or the thousandth, you are seeing two images at once. One brought to your mind by your left eye, and one by your right eye. By combining those two visual impressions we get a three-dimensional view, in this case a perspective of the house. This superimposed double image is called parallax view. We do not notice it but we use it continually.

We do not see the whole house. We will never be able to. We build up a conception of the whole house by assembling fragments of perception in our minds. But we refer to the partial views we have seen as the house, or a house, or as my house. We refer to it with the same label even though we are perceiving different images from different perspectives at different times. 

We do not notice this because it happens quickly. And it functions adequately to label the object of reference this way. Our impressions work well enough most of the time. But we can apply this insight in instances where is matters immensely. 

Multiple Perspectives in Time

In a similar way, our understanding of an object is built up from many impressions over time. If it is the house you live in, for example, we see it many times every day, from different points of view, with attention to different details, in different moods, with different objectives, purposes in our actions and states of mind, experiencing different human interactions, influenced by a collection of moments momentous and mundane, accumulating day by day, and changing as we go. Our memories, which we use continually to orient, are modified by new experiences, by habits, by forgetting, by expectations, by association with other impressions, events and memories. Our present-time perceptions, their connections, and their meaning to us are all subject to change.

Subjects Changing Over Time

Our world evolves as we experience it. Over time millions of sense impressions and the inferences we draw from them act on our memory, accumulate and constitute what we mean when we refer to or think of our house. So, when we refer to our house, the words we use do not point to exactly the same object as the one that comes to the attention of a family member, a delivery driver, a neighbor or a visitor. Or the one we conceived of yesterday. The distinction may not be significant, if we want to get a package delivered. The visual impression, the concept and the labels we use to designate it will function adequately. The words will function to point to a particular house at a particular place and time. But they cannot capture or convey precisely the object which they label.

Objects Changing Over Time

Even as our impressions, experiences and memories of the house evolve, the house evolves. It does not stay the same as it was at the moment when we first saw it. We might paint it, renovate it, put on a new roof. The paint changes day to day. On the scale of human perception that change is too subtle to notice but it is happening. The paint fades or cracks until we notice it. Same with every component of the house. And around the house. And what is in the house. What you know about all those things, how you feel about each of them, all of them, and what you make of that. 

Maybe you can remember the building the first time you saw it. Maybe it looked grand. Inviting. Or shabby. Forbidding. Maybe you remember the lot before it was built. Maybe you remember the lot being cleared, the foundation, the construction materials, the crew at work. Maybe you went back to show your children the place where you grew up long ago, and hardly recognized it, the neighborhood, the feeling you got from the street. The people you once knew who lived there, the neighbors’ house next door, the trees, the stores nearby, the flower garden, that block, the life you lived, the person you were back then when you lived in the apartment you remember, are gone, or different, faded, patched, rebuilt, renovated, revived, or a vacant lot, now overgrown. 

And our memories, fragmentary and imprecise to begin with, fade, change, combine, are colored by experience, expectations, changes of heart, revisions of fact, circumstances, feelings, conversations, errors, photographs and hope. One moment the house felt like a refuge, filled with warmth and love. Another it was a burden, an expense, something to clean, to fix. Once it was a place to bust out of, to escape and launch into the exciting, unknown world out there. Another time it was barely noted. Just home.

But we still think of that place as my house. 

Most people have heard the story of “my grandfather’s axe” – a farmer says something like, this is my grandfather’s axe. Its old. Over the years we changed the head three times and the handle six times, but it still works great.” 

There is nothing about the axe (or the house) that stays the same. But the word we use to describe it stays the same. Something about what the axe means and is, stays the same to us. But we cannot take that word and think it points to something fixed, unchangeable, something comprehensible with uniform meaning for every hearer at every moment. It does not. 

Shinto shrines are rebuilt on site from scratch every generation, but they keep the same name, have the same design, and play the same role in the lives of the people who visit. 

Heraclitus observed that we can’t step into the same river twice, which is true, but for the guy who goes fishing on the weekends or the kids who go swimming every morning, it seems like the same river. It functions for them as the same river. It has the same name. They know where it will be when they go there, and what they mean when they refer to it. 

But moment to moment new drops of water are arriving from upstream and disappearing downstream, moving around, merging with one another, forming eddies and whirlpools, waves and spray, changing temperature and direction around the shifting rocks and sand, boats and branches, light and sound, nothing the same moment to moment, all changing every instant. 

If there is a drought, a flood, or an earthquake, if you go back or forward a thousand years, conditions will change enough for us to see that what we thought of as a thing, the river, was a conditional and temporary collection of things. That when the conditions changed the thing we thought of as having its own nature, as itself, as there, is not there anymore. And soon enough even the signs that it once was will vanish. Its parts dispersed and in its place something else arises.

But still, we know what we mean when we make a plan to meet our friends to go for a picnic by the river. 

The way we use words matches the mistaken way we conceive of what words represent. We think words point to things. We think of our world as composed of things. This is a convenient fiction. Words represent processes, because things are processes. It is no accident that all our hopes and dreams depend on this.

We can treat things as being static, within our human scale of time or space, because on this familiar scale they might not change much, or they might hold enough of the same characteristics over time to qualify for the label we give them: house, or river, or axe. But examined up close, or over time, it is evident that they are processes. The names we use to point to them do not change, which inclines us to conceive of them as static, stable, things. 

Plutarch reports a philosopher’s debate as to whether Theseus’ ship, having been rebuilt completely from bow to stern as each old plank needed replacement, was the same ship it was when it first was built. This is called Theseus’ Paradox.  Some philosophers said it was the same ship. Some said it was not. 

It is not a paradox. It is a vaguely worded question. One of the characteristics of the ship, like the axe, is that some of its qualities come from the mind of the observer. The quality, for example, that it is regarded as “mine” or in this case “Theseus’.” That fact imputes continuity to the changing collection of parts we call a house, a ship or an axe. 

The fact that I see the object as something that functions in a specific way and that the object is available to me is mental, is imputed to the object, and then appears reflected in our mind as an attribute of the object. If it is continually mine and continually functions, you might say, it is the same object. If you limit its definition to its physical components, it is not the same. Sameness is a function of the definition held by the philosopher analyzing the “paradox.” It is not a property of the house or the axe or the ship. 

Not a single cell of our bodies was a part of our body seven years ago, they say. Our bodies are different in substance. And in habits, attitudes, life conditions, memories, acquaintances, capability, goals and experience. We are changing every moment. We might think of our selves as bounded by our skin. But we breath, eat, drink, sweat, excrete, burn energy, consume information through all our senses all the time. We look different. We feel different, We want different things from time to time. We have different goals, passions, shortcomings, resumés and friends. We do different things. Are we the same person or a different one?  We have the same fingerprints, DNA, voice print, iris scan, social security number, address, relatives, and many other attributes we had before. Are we the same or different?

When Tony Soprano tells Phil Leotardo “I am not the kid on the school bus anymore Phil…” Tony saw himself as different; to Phil, returning to the neighborhood after 20 years in prison, Tony, and the streets, seemed pretty much the same. 

We can say there is a continuity of our identity because there is a continuum of causality in which we live and act and change. There is continuity, and there is change. But we use the same name. People we knew years ago may think we are the same person they knew then. They call us by the same name. 

That is called reification. Reification is taking a word to be the reality it points to. It is a natural error in the use of language.

The materially-compounded and mind-projected nature of objects, which we reify based on a label or a name, was taught in the dialog between a monk Nagasena and the King Milinda in the Milinda Panha:

Nagasena: …How did you come here, by foot or in a chariot?”

Milinda: “In a chariot, venerable sir.”

Nagasena: “Then, explain sir, what that is. Is it the axle? Or the wheels, or the chassis, or reins, or yoke that is the chariot? Is it all of these combined, or is it something apart from them?”

Milinda: “It is none of these things, venerable sir.”

Nagasena: “Then, sir, this “chariot” is an empty sound. You spoke falsely when you said that you came here in a chariot…

Day to day, as a practical matter, there is usually no need to quibble about this, or to worry about it at all. You can board your chariot, or get in your car, and go where you want to go. The words function. The things function. We understand one another pretty well about most things most of the time. But sometimes we don’t. Wars, divorces, law suits, revolutions, business, economies, bar fights, hollering and silent fuming around the holiday table may be a consequence of this. So may families, contracts, enterprises, alliances, treaties and victories.

If talking about an axe, a river or a building – perceptible things – can be elusive, how much more will shared meaing elude us when we are trying to share the unseen from mind to mind. Ideas, feelings, experience, a  vision of the world, are not things accessible to sense perception. Yet we talk about them. How often do you hear thoughtful, passionate people debating their idea of God, what God wants, their relationship to God, the unfolding of history, the nature of reality, the character of people, the relationship of the individual to society, duty, justice, chance, the universe, or the good? 

Doesn’t it seem that people may be thinking of different things when they use these words? Most of us think we understand when we hear the words “turn the other cheek”, “stand and fight”, “be kind”, “the survival of the fittest”, “duty and honor”, “right and wrong”, or even the speed of light, day and night, love, time, or courage.

What does this mean for us? As practitioners it is a matter of life and death, a choice between a life of drudgery or liberation. We assume that the qualities we project onto objects are possessed by those objects, and so must be visible to anyone with clear sight and a sane mind. We assume those qualities are more or less fixed. We make these assumptions about ourselves and about other people. But,

We are changing all the time. The changes are not random, they are not mechanical, and they cannot be conjured from the imagination just because your local post-modernist says so. The qualities we observe in objects, people, and systems, and which pervade our experience, are a function of the things and conditions on which those objects, people and systems depend, on what we bring to the encounter, that is, on our experience, our desires, and our choices about what to do. The constellation of causes and conditions which produce our field of experience are vast, hidden, and surprising. But their nature is knowable. We are free to further the good all the time.

If we are trying to describe something not perceptible to the senses, a transcendent reality, an emotion, an experience, then words will be allusive. If we are talking about states of mind to someone who has not experienced them, like a new practitioner, if we are talking about a practice method that we are introducing, pitfalls to be encountered during the course of practice, successes to be achieved, insights that may arise, the results of insight on our hearts and mind, then words are not a reliable means to convey ideas precisely from mind to mind. But we do need them. They will be provisional. Rough. Expedient. But we need to start somewhere and develop the communication step by step, with goodwill, joined to experience, and shared. 

That is what we are doing in this group.

We might yearn for it all to be stable. Unchanging. Predictable. But it is not. If it was, we could not exist. 

As we live, we change. Like the river, the house. Like everything. As we practice karate and mind training, as we choose how to live, who to be in contact with, who we aspire to be, we change. The change can be surprising, breathtaking, painstaking, subtle. But as we change, we can follow the path of wholesome action, and fulfill our lives in a way unimaginable when we started. That is how training works. Proceding step by step on a well-traveled path to freedom.

This process has been working for you throughout your training. We use language to point to experience. The we train. We follow the finger-tip and glimpse the moon. So, for today’s instruction, when the breath is long, note that it is long. When the breath is short, note that it is short. Note as we sense the motion of the air at a single point at the nostrils or upper lip. Enter the present naturally and remain there for the practice period. 

We use the words to enter the reality of training. Mostly we train.

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Post Copyright © 2024 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate, Saluda, NC

Photo by Jordan Steranka via Pexels

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read True Karate Dō by Jeffrey Brooks

“One of the best books I’ve read in years, inviting and compelling. Jeff Brooks moves effortlessly from martial arts to Buddhism to consciousness studies, self-transformation, and related fields in this wide-ranging and Illuminating study that has much to offer both novice explorers and veteran practitioners. A splendid achievement.”

— Philip Zaleski, Editor, The Best Spiritual Writing series