6 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Buddhism is NOT life-denying.
People misunderstand this "way beyond words and letters" to mean that "words and letters" are necessarily bad. It is possible to express with beautiful words and letters while fully free of words and letters. In fact, it is possible to be a prisoner, tangled in silence! I advise to leap past both words and no words. (I am now teaching something from the 700 page Blue Cliff Record which is about silence. :-)
Comment by Pongpianskul at 21/01/2025 at 00:56 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Which koan from Blue Cliff Record is about silence? I agree that verbal teachings are incredibly valuable - even the long wordy teachings like the early Mahayana Sutras are worth reading though some are 1000s of pages long.
A lot of people point out Vimalakirti's silence when questioned about non-duality but obviously Vimalakirti's silence only has significance to those assembled because of all the words he's spoken in the previous chapters. lol