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a cat story

brainfuck

there is a programing language name brainfuck. it has 8 characters only {< > + - . , [ ]} and is very famous in the family of weird languages.

zen

i grow up exposing very little to zen and zen art. mostly because zen masters and budhdish masters are extremely rare in the population. and they are not only rare, they clump together in place that ordinary persons dont cross. (if you wonder whether you have zen art, you dont). which is to say that most look-like zen and buddish stuff that are available to ordinary people's eyes are wishy-washy stuff. and not-small part of that is a pretentious legacy & ridiculous fraud. you never understand how weirdly-funny-weirdly-sad it feels for an oriental individual to see gay monks, wearing-make-up monks, monks that make statue of himself to put on to the altar of the pagoda, after monk running away people find out he has shampoo ... in the media.

why there are so much similar but not zen stuff? i guess it's like in philosophy , fuzzy words are difficult to understand, and if someone speaks fuzzy words and wears a particular kind of clothes, that guy must be wise. however, if you use reason to push these words just a little bit, they break like shiny glass.

there is even this principle in zenology that zen students can always cling on: "only he, who sees, knows". which means that if i see wonder in some stuff but you dont see it, you cant know whether i really see it or not. you are not me. this argument means that in zen, no one can ever legitimately refute anyone.

i'm not against the shallow stuff though. each village has a pagoda, and it becomes a common playground for old people (like my grandma) and kids (like me) tagging along to hang out with other peers and monks. (there are both male and female monks). and that's cute. that's a pleasant of collective communal life.

oriental wisdom has this belief on the touch of destiny (duyen). it means that sometimes in your life your trajectory'll cross with the trajectory of some person that is incredible to you. so if i dont have the chance to see zen masters and their colleages, i can say that we dont have that miracle of luck.

but in very rare times that i have chance to see them, it's weird.

a cat story

here is a made-up story:

in a zen academy, the West house and East house are arguing over a cat. the question is "does the cat have buddistic feature?". the zen master, upon seeing that, grabs the cat up, says:

no zen students can say anything. eventually, the zen master has to kill the cat.

at that night, his senior student comes back from somewhere, he tells the senior student the cat story. the senior student, upon hearing that story, takes off his own grass slippers, putting the slippers on his own head, leaving the room.

the zen master sees that, saying:

commentary

after reading that story, i was brainf*cked. then i find out that there is even a collection of that kind of zen stories in a book named "the gate that doesnt have place to enter". those stories are short, they borrow a rhetoric object to teach zen. these stories are "wtf!" kinds of stories. (another example: the clapping sound of one hand)

anyway, with my little exposure to zen art, i can only try to read the commentary of other zen masters (or the translation of that). the zen master uses the cat as object to educate zen to his students. because students were arguing about zenistic features, the zen teacher means "if you can really say a sentence of truth about zen meaning, you can save the cat".

(if you want to attack the cat killing action, look at the medieval chapters of the world history first. this cat story is not about the cat).

the commentary says with just a chop of knife, the zen master can kill off all the ego in the zen students in that house. this is a broad message to youngsters: hey youth, if you are afraid of dying, then die once, if you already die once, you dont need to die ever again. with a single (i guess hypothetical) big death, you'll negate all the meaning and purpose of life from your first cry to your last breath. then, you'll see from the source of the world, there is an unexpected and fresh soul being really (i mean really) born. that's the verb "see" in zen.

so what is the point of putting slippers on head and leaving? that action is pointless, it doesnt add any new content to the discussion. but it means that, if you already see your new eternal soul, no one can ever kill you again.

in conclusion, the message is that, on zen, you'll have to kill completely your ego for once, then you'll become eternal, like universe, like nature. the commentary tells another short story. he says he has a old wooden bucket to hold water in it. after more than twenty years, one morning, the bucket cracks at the bottom. water gets out and he cant hold water with that bucket anymore. but suddenly, the bucket have a new bottom that is bottomless. and from that, the water of wisdom blows up like a fountain of youth. he brings that bucket to his teacher. the teacher says that, "if you dont know how to preserve that water, it'll go draught again, that's the difficult part".

my illiterate commentary:

i advocate the "launch the minimal working version very fast, then iterate, iterate, iterate", not "die one big death, then done" because how do you know when you are done? if you think you are done, 99% you are just arrogantly noob. i never bet on things that have only 1% of being right.

anyway, if that is not brainfuck of zen, i dont know what is ^^. i mean, two persons looking at the empty cracked bucket and talk about ..stuff.

maybe i dont have destiny with zen.