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Neither this nor the opposite
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The sutras and other Buddhist scriptures are full of contradictory statements such as « neither knowledge nor non-knowledge », « neither born nor not born », « neither finished nor unfinished ». These rather disconcerting terms are far from being idiosyncratic linguistic forms or academic plays on words, they on the contrary encourage us to go beyond the confines of discursive thought. The latter always uses as a basis the reality which is contrary to what it conceives.
This being so, the two possibilities available to those who still want to rely on language to express the ineffable and the unthinkable are to resort to metaphors and/or to aporias through simultaneous negation of one thing and of its opposite, for instance « neither born nor not born », « neither finished nor unfinished » etc. Gérard Chinrei Pilet (January 2015) |
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