#quietism

To reject delusion and accept truth is just another form of delusion, Yung Chia says later, for such discrimination between rejecting and accepting is still dualistic; one who practices in this way mistakes a thief for his own son. The Way is not a matter of escaping delusion, because there is nowhere to escape except to an equally delusive quietism. It is rather a matter of liberating delusion, as Dōgen might say. What distinguishes liberated delusion is the utter freedom of the mind to dance freely from one śūnya thing to another, from one set of concepts to a different and perhaps contradictory set. The difference is not necessarily in the concepts themselves—they may be the same—but how effortlessly the mind is able to play with them without getting stuck. To the extent that the mind thinks there is an objectifiable Truth (whether already grasped or not yet), or to the extent that it thinks dwelling in blankness of mind is the Truth, this freedom is not realized: the mind trips over itself, sticks at this, jumps to that, and doesn’t want to let go because it still understands its fundamental task as finding and dwelling in a secure “home” for itself.

'Between these poles - on one side facts, nature, what there is; on the other duty, justice, what there should be; on one side innocence, on the other education; between the claims of spontaneity and those of obligation, between the injustice of coercing others, and the injustice of leaving them to go their own way, Tolstoy wavered and struggled all his life. And not only he, but all those populists and socialists and idealistic students who in Russia "went to the people," and could not decide whether they went to teach or to learn, whether the "good of the people" for which they were ready to sacrifice their lives was what "the people" in fact desired, or something that only the reformers knew to be good for them...'

To adore Jesus at the transfiguration, to love God in great things, is not so perfect an act of faith as to worship them in small ones, to worship Jesus on the cross, since faith is only truly living when what is seen and felt, deny and try to destroy it. Perfect faith emerges from this battle with the senses strengthened and triumphant.

"Don't Blame the Mirror!"