2011/12/06

Wherever It Lies...

"Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot."—Plotinus, Enneads
The juxtaposition just pleased me, Neo-Platonism being remarkably similar to Buddhism.

Anyway, 天上天下唯我独尊 ("Tenjô tenge yui ga doku son") is usually translated as "between Heaven and Earth, I alone am holy", but there is no "I" in it. It actually means "Over or under heaven, [there is] one [thing] holy, [a] single [thing] venerable."

It's actually just a quite orthodox assertion of the Buddhist teaching of non-duality, the extreme form of monism that even denies logical negation (because not-A is just a category of thought-in-relation-to-A, not a reality in its own right). In non-duality, only a singular entity can be said to have an absolutely real existence; since the entity in question is essentially identical with the Monad and Absolute of Greek philosophy, which are both Aquinas' Actus Subsistens Essendi (God), it makes sense to say that that one, single thing is holy and venerable.

It has nothing to do with asserting "the divine within" since, what with the teaching of anatman or the non-self (but literally the non-soul—"atman" is the Sanskrit equivalent of "anima"), there is no "within".

Most people in Japan are vaguely aware that Buddhism uses the phrase in a different context from how the phrase is used dramatically. The "worship me" version comes from a Sengoku warlord; I wanna say Uesugi Kenshin, who claimed to be an avatar of Bishamonten, a Buddhist god revered in Japan as the god of war.

And yes, there are Buddhist gods, and they're not the same thing as Buddhas. Actually in Vajrayana Buddhism being reborn as a god is considered in the same category as being reborn deaf and blind, since it makes it much more difficult to advance toward enlightenment.

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