Let It Be

Friday, August 21

“By ‘leaving things be’ I do not mean inaction; I mean respecting things, being still in the presence of things, letting them speak. Existing is absolute. Things are of infinite importance in existing. But as Kant says, existing is not a character of things; it is their givenness. And since the givenness of things is what I take to be the foundation of respect for them, I cannot see that the emphasis on things of a certain character as opposed to things lacking this character, affords an ultimate purchase for interpreting the possibility of respect.”

p. 154 the Inward Morning

I thoroughly enjoy reading, often I read several books a month outside of school. My favorite things to read are memoirs or stories of personal struggle or triumph. One of my favorite books that I’ve read was about a man in rehab for drugs and alcohol and his experiences there. On his first day in rehab he was given three books: the twelve steps manual, a small bible, and an even smaller book on Buddhism. The man never read the bible, or the twelve steps manual, but he often reflected on his life when reading this tiny book of Buddhist proverbs. I found which book the author was reading, and bought a copy myself.

I wouldn’t say that I’m thoroughly educated in Buddhist practices, but I have read this tiny book and studied the religion vaguely, and I’ve found some of these proverbs incredibly insightful and provoking of personal reflection. After reading Bugbee’s thoughts on ‘leaving things be’ one of the passages in the Buddhist book came to mind.

“According to Buddhist teachers like Pema Chödrön and others, one of the first real steps on the Buddhist path is a state called “ye tang che”. “Ye” means “totally” or “completely”, “tang che” means “exhausted”. So “ye tang che” describes a state of total exhaustion. In the Buddhist context, this primarily means exhaustion of hope, the hope of ego to gain profit from the spiritual teachings, to gain security. Terms like “Exhaustion of hope” or “Giving up hope” may sound strange, funny and totally depressing when we use them without context, but they make sense nevertheless when we look at the deeper meaning in reference to Buddhist practice.

When the Buddhist teachings — or spiritual teachings of any kind — are first perceived, there is quite a big chance that we approach the teachings as a method to gain something, to develop into a better version of ourselves, to improve, to repair ourselves and so on. We could also say that we use the teachings to find security and comfort, the security and comfort that everything is alright, that we’re on the right track and that in our glorious future to come we’ll enter a state of total fearlessness and great peace of mind. Things sound promising to us, so we have great expectations

After we have for a certain timespan hoped as much as we could to reach some certain stage of development or state of mind that seemed desirable to us, maybe through meditation or another practice, after we tried to get wiser, better, sharper, it seems that there is no way at all that we will get any of that. We might have created some sort of pseudo-experience of the things we hoped to attain, but after a while it went away or we had a feeling from the beginning on that something was not complete.”

http://portofsaints.wordpress.com/2007/04/04/ye-tang-che-the-hope-dilemma/

That excerpt is not directly from the tiny book I was originally talking about, but it hits the point. Ye tang che: totally and completely exhausted. This idea is that we do not have a personal agenda. We do not try and gain something; we do not try and change the world to better ourselves or our understanding of the world. To understand is not to care. To care about something, you must have an opinion. I will use smoking as an example. You can care about the topic of cigarette smoking. You have your own position on the subject, the harmful effects it has on a person’s health, the price a pack of cigarettes cost, the money you waste. On the other hand you can care about smoking for the relief of stress it brings, the social conversations that happen in the smokers section. However this is not understanding smoking. To understand the habit of smoking cigarettes you are not required to have a position. You don’t have to care; it is simply laying out the facts and observing them as they are.

To understand things we often have to relate them to ourselves. Thinking about things in a different way to make sense of them, however Bugbee states that this is not understanding.  If we alter a concept to make better sense of it for ourselves, it is not the original concept that was attempting to be made sense of. By forcing our analogies on things, and attempting to gain something from them, we are polluting our understanding with bias. Ye tang che explains to us how to not impress ourselves on things in attempt to understand. The only way we truly understand things is to examine them from all sides and accept those sides, to ‘leave things be’.