I was thinking a little about dualism the other day, carrying on from my previous post a little. Dualistic thought is covered early on in the Tao Te Ching, and from what I’ve seen around the internet and in my own writings and views, can be given negative connotations.
I’m coming to another viewpoint now, put simply, that dualism in neither good nor bad in itself; it simply is. We can’t get by without it, and it is vital to our existence that it’s there. We make value judgments every day in order to function and survive, for these judgments we need dualistic thought. The problem, as I see it, is when we get so caught up in our world of dualism that we forget that it’s only a set of arbitrary concepts.
Consider light/dark, it’s a great dualistic metaphor for things, not least good or evil. In the Taiji symbol it gets used to point out the mutual dependence of things, night and day, etc. But it’s a bit lost on a person who was born blind, similarly, a dualism based on silence and noise is lost on a person who was born deaf. As soon as you start factoring in people who don’t experience the world quite the same way we do, it all starts to get a bit more iffy.
Our dualisms can be biased by our subjective viewpoints; hot/cold is another dualism, but the exact definition varies from person to person. It seems to me that each time we “define” a dualism, we simply rope of a chunk of grey area and hope for the best.
I used to think dualistic thought was a negative thing, then realised that this was itself dualistic thought. I have to admit, I found that quite amusing for a while. So this leads me to my current contention; Dualistic thought is necessary, not particularly desirable or undesirable, just there. The most important thing is to see it for what it is, necessary, but ultimately an illusion.
December 18th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Hi Richard,
I agree that dualistic thought is necessary in day-to-day activities and communication. And I agree that many dualities are relative. Your hot/cold example is one. What is cold to one person may be warm to another. Yet at their extremes they are not relative to a perceiver. Heat requires energy. Cold is the absence of heat. This is the principle behind air conditioning and refrigeration. To make your house cool in the summer or keep your meat frozen for weeks, you don’t “create” cold air. You remove the warm air. What’s left over is cold. Cold and hot are not one.
Where we disagree is around your assertion that duality is illusion. If I understand things correctly, this is one of the major distinctions between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism. The Mahayanist will say, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” More the point, “Samsara is Nirvana, Nirvana is Samsara.” In other words. What is good is the same as what is evil. This is the ultimate realization.
The Theravadist, on the other hand, would say, “Samsara is the result of greed, hatred, and delusion. By eradicating greed, hatred, and delusion one realizes Nibanna.” Remove the causes of suffering and suffering ends. Suffering and no-suffering are not one.
Bhikkhu Bodhi , a Tharavada monk, has an essay about this on Access to Insight here: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/bps-essay_27.html
PaulG
December 20th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Hey Paul,
Thanks for the comment and the link. I do agree with you that that Samsara is the result of greed, hatred and delusion, I believe that these things are a result of our grasping behaviour, our egotistical desire to control and manipulate. I just think that this stems from the desire to divide and classify, so we have to be very careful about our divisions and classifications and how we use them.
I also agree about the way to alleviate Samsara, I just feel that the best way to do this is to see reality as it really is, to try and see through to the underlying form of reality. The view I’m taking is that the underlying reality is the same, our interpretation is what makes it different.
I always liked the example of the electromagnetic spectrum, x-rays, radio, microwaves, light, it’s all the same radiation, the frequency just varies. Same with carbon, it’s one of the most common things in the universe and forms no end of substances from graphite (one of the softest) to diamond (one of the hardest); the properties may change (you can burn coal, but not diamond), but at the end of the day, despite the form, it’s still carbon.
This probably isn’t the best way of me explaining it, hope I’m making sense.
Rich.