Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College.

As explained in the previous unit of Modern Philosophy, underlying the enterprise of modern philosophy termed by Descartes as the “Tree of Philosophy” is the root of “metaphysics” which addresses the most generic traits of basic substances of the world, viz., soul, body and God. Therefore, to appreciate the title of Rene Descartes as “Father of Modern Philosophy,” we will spend the following two weeks to read the entirety of Descartes’s “Meditations on First Philosophy,” and I hope you can get as much insight as you can from this incredibly rich, and quintessentially “modern” text of philosophy.

Being among the enshrined modern philosophical classics, none of a single word in these Meditations can be overlooked by contemporary readers. However, these Meditations were after all written almost 400 years ago, which would naturally indicate some unfamiliar nature to readers today. One of the difficult reasons to read Descartes’s Meditations is to grasp how Descartes used old, scholastic terms and jargons to express his modern thought. If we gradually peel away these pre-modern layers from the kernel of his thought, we will find the distinctively modern traits of Descartes’s thought in the kernel, and thus, feel immediately connected to it. In the following, I will provide a brief and preliminary explanation of prominent themes of Meditation I-III, and I hope it can facilitate your actual reading of the book.

Firstly, the title of the book “Meditations” is fairly interesting. Starting from Aristotle’s “contemplative life,” running through Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” and Augustine’s “Confessions,” the philosophical tradition of the West evolved into Descartes’s “Meditations” to have indicated a rich “meditative” lineage where “meditation” is understood as a systematic reflection upon philosophical problems, and the reflection is aided by a certain kind of focused mental discipline. This richly meditative tradition of the West tends to be overlooked by contemporary readers since the current use of the term “meditation” is easier to be connected to Hindu, Buddhist or other non-Western practices of meditation. However, if we read the entirety of Descartes’s Meditations, we can still find some similarity between this meditation of a philosopher’s with other more religiously oriented ones. To put it briefly, this philosophical meditation also needs a two-way system of descending and ascending, or one of reduction and recovery. In Buddhist Chan meditation, for instance, you need to focus upon your breathing so as to reduce your consciousness to a peaceful and all-encompassing base, and then, employ that purified consciousness to re-contemplate worldly phenomena so as to live a mindful life here and now. Similarly, Descartes uses the method of “doubt” to challenge the validity of every piece of knowledge he acquired before; once he got to the bottom of his doubt, he found one piece of knowledge that he cannot doubt, viz., the existence of the thinking “I”; and then, he would do further contemplation upon all ideas that exist within this thinking “I” so as to check whether any of these ideas can provide certain knowledge of the outside world. I believe every reader, as long as they closely followed each word of Descartes’ Meditations, would also experience such an intense process of purification and reunification of human mind, which makes Descartes’ thought process deeply “practical” and “performative” in the regular sense of doing “meditation.”

Secondly, the method of “doubt” used by Descartes to get to the all-encompassing base consciousness of “I think,” is not a normal one. It is termed as the “hyperbolic doubt” which would consider any piece of human knowledge as completely false as long as it indicates a scintilla of uncertainty and dubitability. Using this hyperbolic doubt in Meditation I, Descartes threw away all pieces of knowledge, which he acquired through sense, imagination, memory and even pure intellect, with only the sheer activity of “I think” remaining as the rock bottom of human consciousness that cannot be thrown away any more. Here, the radical departure of Descartes’s philosophy from the pre-Modern Aristotelian one cannot be more visible: as we explained before, Aristotle’s natural philosophy is based upon the common-sensical observations of worldly phenomena. However, here, Descartes says that humans’ “common-sense” does not make any sense until every piece of it gets radically doubted and thoroughly scrutinized. Since doubting and scrutinizing require the ability of independent and free human thinking more than anything else, we can surely discern a distinctively “modern” sign of Descartes’s philosophy, just as we once characterized Copernicus’s heliocentric astronomy as indicating the same strength of human thinking and thus, as the starting point of modern scientific revolution.

Thirdly, since Descartes does not take “common-sensical” observation as the starting point of the pursuit of human knowledge, the more authentic approach to obtain human knowledge for Descartes is termed as “idealism,” which is distinguished from another very important, later lineage of modern thought, viz., “empiricism.” Descartes’s idealism suggests that in order to obtain human knowledge about anything in the world, we cannot start from a naïve perception of the world which takes the existence of things in it as granted, since the very existence of things in the world has been put into radical doubt in Meditation I. Rather, because the inner world of human subjectivity, which is termed by Descartes as “I think” or pure thinking, is more certain than anything else, we need to search for “ideas” that exist in our mind first, and then, infer whether these “ideas” correspond to realities outside the human mind; in other words, we need to examine whether these “ideas” can inform us of any knowledge about the outside world. Through this idealistic approach of epistemology, Descartes categorizes the origin of human ideas into three groups: ideas can be innate, invented, or affected from outside. Descartes also scrutinizes these ideas one after another regarding their validity of informing knowledge of objects outside human mind. In other words, rather than taking “realities” to be the prior origin of “ideas,” Descartes pays his primary attention to “ideas” in human mind, and then ask whether “ideas” inform humans of “realities.” Since “ideas” are more primary than “realities,” the role of autonomy and human free thinking gets prioritized and glorified during the process, which is surely a re-affirmation of the “modernity” of Descartes’s thought.

Finally, another significant aspect of Descartes’s Meditations is his theology, viz., his reflection on the existence of God and the role of the idea of God in regaining the validity of human knowledge that he has radically doubted prior to the conclusion of “I think; therefore I am.” For Descartes, it is a crucial step for the aforementioned epistemological approach of idealism to know that God is the creator of “I,” and more importantly, God is so good that He would not make “I” commit mistakes even on ideas which “I” can perceive vividly and clearly. Only after making sure the ultimate kindness of God, viz., “God is not a deceiver” in Descartes’s own words, Descartes thinks that we can believe our “natural tendency” to think of certain ideas in our mind, such as those mathematical ideas and sensory perceptions, as corresponding to realities outside of human mind. Be this as it may, our wondering is that: is God really an absolutely necessary idea to Descartes’s system? Or as some scholars intend to argue, is Descartes’s meandering thinking on God just a sign of Descartes’s “political shrewdness” since he did not want his writings and his person to undergo the same destiny of Galileo Galilei under the censorship of the Church? I would be very interested in hearing your thought on these questions.

In a word, in Meditation I-III, Descartes finds the undoubtable foundation of human knowledge, “I think therefore I am,” via a radical method of hyperbolic doubt, and then, after proving the existence of a kind God, he intends to re-ascend from the all-encompassing base consciousness of “I think,” and regain human knowledge via the approach of idealism. Please do read the Meditations word-by-word, and my summary here by no means captures the full glory of this quintessentially modern writing at the dawn of modern philosophy.

Hallo, This is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College.    

In 1644, Descartes published his Principles of Philosophy, and intended to promote it as a textbook of philosophy to be adopted by universities of Europe at that time. Descartes knew that this was deliberately to challenge the dominant role of Aristotelianism in the European academia. After all, the replacing of one textbook with another means a great deal. Although whether Descartes succeeded to promote his textbook in the institutional level is another story, he is indeed universally acclaimed by later historians as the father of modern philosophy.

Before Descartes, we discussed Aristotle, Copernicus, and Galileo in this second section of “modern scientific revolution” at the course of “Modern Philosophy.” We find that although Copernicus and Galileo laid out a very robust refutation against key points of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, none of these scientists’ thought is comprehensive enough to address the established Aristotelianism as a whole. As we have discussed, the philosophical system of Aristotle was so comprehensive as to be able to include everything that humans could know in his time. Therefore, to challenge the official status of Aristotelianism, Descartes’s philosophy must also be no less comprehensive. Descartes likened his comprehensive version of philosophy to a tree:

“Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals. By ‘morals’ I understand the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom.” (Principles, 9B:14)

Put in the background of the entire corpus of Descartes’s works, why Descartes thinks of philosophy as such would be more comprehensible. Metaphysics studies the most generic traits of things in the universe which exist under three major categories: soul, body and God. Physics studies the “body” part of the universe, and furnishes the laws of nature which explain the movement of varying bodies in the world. Medicine and Mechanics are two branches of applied physics, which are about how to cure human diseases and how to design technologies to alleviate human labor, two crucial areas pertaining to the convenience and sustainability of mundane human life. The “morals,” or the ethics is about what humans should do in varying situations, and according to Descartes, this is the highest branch of human knowledge since it needs all sorts of other knowledge in order to deliver the right ethical decisions.

Among all these parts of philosophy, we’ll focus upon “metaphysics” in the following weeks, where we’ll scrutinize Descartes’s famous argument for “I think therefore I am” and how he built his metaphysical system addressing the substances of soul, God and body. However, when Descartes presented his tree of philosophy in an intended textbook, his thought was in a relatively mature stage. The tree didn’t include much information about how he got to the root of his philosophy, viz., that dualistic metaphysics of soul and body, in the first hand. In order to understand how he got there and prepare our study of his metaphysics, we therefore need to trace his philosophical career back to a much earlier stage.

Before Descartes turned into his metaphysical thought in 1628, he was a very successful mathematician and physicist. Seen from the perspective of the on-going scientific revolution, the greatest contribution Descartes made as a scientist is surely his invention of analytic geometry, which unifies algebra and geometry, and hence, paves the way for the birth of calculus in Newton’s and Leibniz’s thought.

There are two major points we need to grasp in the ground-breaking work of the Geometry of Descartes.

Firstly, the unification of algebra and geometry leads to the full digitization of the objective natural world, which is unimaginable before Descartes. The crucial step for Descartes to achieve this is to illustrate that all major algebraic operations in Descartes’s time, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the square root, can correspond to a certain segment of a line, and hence, there is no reason to limit human imagination of a magnitude within three dimensions. Instead, a simple line segment can express a magnitude of any dimension, and once discovering the way how to express geometrical figures using algebraic means, the capacity of measuring and calculating natural movement in reality will be exponentially increased. If any one wonders where the idea of the digitization of the entire world in the movie of “Matrix” originally comes from, let’s ask Descartes.

Secondly, to resolve complex geometrical problems in his time, Descartes indicates an unusually high awareness towards the underlying “method” for the desired solutions. For instance, to resolve a geometrical problem, Descartes would firstly assign a letter to each of the known and unknown magnitudes. Then, he would write down as many equations as he can find to express the varying relationships between these unknown and known magnitudes. In the following, he would try to reduce the complex level of these equations so as to find a way to express the unknown from the known. Finally, once he found the answer of the unknown, Descartes would furthermore deduce complex relationships among magnitudes from the newly discovered simple ones. In the work of the Geometry, we can find many concrete examples about how Descartes described and applied this “method.” And the application of this method is so successful that Descartes furthermore thought he should use it to resolve all questions humans can ask, including those most abstruse and abstract ones in metaphysics.

Therefore, in 1637, Descartes published his “Discourse on the Method,” and generalized his “method” in four points:

“The first was never to accept anything as true if I didn’t have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid jumping to conclusions and preserving old opinions, and to include in my judgements only what presented itself to my mind so vividly and so clearly that I had no basis of calling it in question. The second was to divide each of the difficulties I examine into as many parts as possible and as might be required in order to resolve them better. The third was to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by starting with the simplest and most easily known objects in order to move up gradually to the knowledge of the most complex, and by stipulating some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence. The last was to make all my enumerations so complete, and my reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure that I hadn’t overlooked anything.” (pp. 9, Discourse on the Method, trans. Jonathan Bennett 2017.)

The four rules are quite self-explanatory, and they can all be understood against the practice Descartes conducted in his analytical geometry. In other words, in any pursuit of human knowledge, Descartes believes we should aim for evident knowledge, which should be as vivid and clear as the one of math. Then, we would find all available chunks of information relevant to the solution of puzzles, put them into order, and then, reduce the complex ones to the simple ones, and address the simples ones first with a final synthesis to move from the simple to the complex. Since the aforementioned tree of philosophy is just a result of Descartes’s application of his method which ultimately derives from math, we can safely conclude that although metaphysics is seen as a root of the tree, the real soil to grow the entire tree of philosophy of Descartes is actually his mathematics. So, whoever said that nobody unfamiliar with math cannot learn philosophy? I hope you find some historical predecessor to Descartes’s thought here.

So, how would Descartes employ this “method” so as to create the dualistic metaphysics of “mind” vs “body” as the foundation of modern thought? That will be the question we will tackle for our following learning of modern philosophy. In general, Descartes’s thought is rigorous, methodic, systematic and creative, indeed a rare talent of philosophy, the learning of which can almost be guaranteed to bring a transformation of our own thought.

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College!

Among all modern scientists who have helped to initiate and somewhat complete the Modern Scientific Revolution since the ingenious work of Copernicus, I like Galileo the most. He wrote his ground-breaking scientific works in the form of Socratic dialogue and using a fairly accessible, vernacular language, viz., Italian, in his time, which was to imitate Plato’s prototypical genre of philosophical writing. While presenting his trailblazing new science, Galileo also seriously thought about so many topics significant for the development of philosophy in general, among which God, humans, and nature are by no means trivial mentions. Most importantly, compared with Descartes and other continental philosophers in the early Modern period, Galileo was down-to-earth and always tried to embed his rigorous reasoning within experiments, observations, and hence, made sure that such reasoning does not fly too high away from humans’ common sense. If I have to express what I expect science majors at the college to become after they graduate, I wish they would be like Galileo, a gentle, well-rounded, and wise scientific soul.

Seen from the perspective of Galileo’s entire career, he had to accomplish three tasks in order to continue the scientific revolution started by Copernicus. He had to deal with two authorities which swayed a great power in the scholarly world of Galileo’s time: the authority of the Christian Bible, and the authority of Aristotle. After this, he surely needed to present his new scientific discovery in the most accessible and professional way.

His way to address the authority of the Bible on scientific matters is best represented by one letter to Castelli, which he wrote in 1613. He views that the Bible and the new science take charge of different things. Regarding salvation and other articles of Faith, the Bible has its absolute authority; however, since God the creator endows human beings with sense and reason, for Galileo, there is no reason not to use them, and therefore, the new science has its irreplaceable authority regarding the study of nature. If verses in the Bible seem to contradict what the new science discovers, we should seek “wise interpretations” of these verses so as to make the biblical truth compatible with scientific ones. In this letter, the refutation of Galileo against scholars’ use of the Joshua 10:12-13 to discredit Copernicus is a fun to read, since according to Galileo, Copernicus’s heliocentric astronomy makes more sense of the biblical verse which implies God’s command to stop the movement of the sun, and hence, this is also a great example on how a scientist can provide a “wise interpretation” of the Bible so as to square the authority of new science with the one of religious establishment.

The second authority Galileo needs to address is Aristotle, who, as we discussed before, held an absolute authority among scholastic scholars regarding the study of nature. In the “Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems” (1632), Galileo discusses the authority of Aristotle in this way: only blind people need a guide when they walk in flat and open region; however, for anyone “who has eyes in his head and in his mind should use them as guide.” In other words, sense and reason are the genuine guide for humans to pursue science; even if Aristotle was still alive in Galileo’s time, Galileo believed that Aristotle would admit many of his mistakes in his original scientific writings in light of new evidences and demonstrations. Therefore, Galileo concludes that it is due to the lack of courage that scholars in his days stubbornly held on to the old authority of Aristotle in order to refuse new approaches of the study of nature.

Through Galileo’s writings on the two authorities, we find origins of many significant ideas of modern philosophy, such as John Locke’s separation of church and state and Kant’s definition of enlightenment as the courageous use of human reason in public. I once explained that the reason for us to study modern scientific revolution is to find origins of these ideas we initially discussed in the first section of the course on the Enlightenment. I hope you understand why this is so now.

Finally, the most important part of Galileo’s work is surely to present his new discoveries using the new scientific methodology. In this regard, I select an excerpt of Galileo’s “Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences” for your reading, and from here, we can discern such a classical use of scientific method that scientists have consistently employed it since the time of Galileo and as a consequence, such an application also caused so many profound transformations in human society.

The thinking procedure of Galileo’s work, which he called “a new science of motion,” can be summarized as follows:

Firstly (pp.334), to define the overall nature of the work. Galileo says that why such a science is new in comparison to old ones is because it cares about the exact mathematical measures and proportions that an accelerated motion indicates.

Secondly (pp. 335-336), to propose a new hypothesis about an unknown matter (viz., the uniformly accelerated motion) from the knowledge scientists already have (viz., the uniform motion). In other words, since we already know in the case of the uniform motion that space traveled by an object is proportionate to time, we can hypothesize in the uniformly accelerated motion that the increase of velocity of such an object is proportionate to time as well. As indicated in other scientific endeavors, proposing new hypotheses on unknown matters according to known ones involve genuine creativity of human thought on the basis of lots of guesses and trials. In this regard, there is really no strict method to follow, although we can discern a pattern of human thought to say a new hypothesis is proposed according to what is already known. However, this is just a pattern of thought, and how this pattern is manifested in varying cases really depends upon unpredictable human creativities, among which Galileo’s one is by no means negligible.

Thirdly (pp. 337-339), to resolve conceptual difficulties implied by the hypothesis. In this case, the difficulty is about how to envision the infinitesimal increase of speed at the initial moment of a uniformly accelerated motion.

Fourthly (pp.339-340), to disregard distracting questions which are normally more complex than the ones a newly proposed hypothesis is intended to address. So, Galileo argued with his friends that before we study the cause of a free-falling object, we need to describe the mathematical traits of its uniformly accelerated motion at first. This also speaks to a constant nature of scientific reasoning: we need to put things in order so that before tackling more difficult questions, let’s tackle easier ones at first.

Fifthly, (pp.340-342) to refute competitive hypotheses on the same matter. In this case, the alternative hypothesis that the increase of speed of a uniformly accelerated motion is proportionate to space, rather than to time, would lead to absurd consequences, and therefore, it got a quick refutation from Galileo before he argued the validity of the newly proposed one.

Sixthly, (pp. 345-346) the velocity of a freely-falling object cannot be directly measured in Galileo’s time. Therefore, in order to verify the truth of the hypothesis, Galileo deduces, using mathematical means, verifiable consequences from the hypothesis, and then, he designed experiments to check whether the observed result complies with thus predicted consequences. Here, one deduced consequence of the proposed hypothesis is expressed in Theorem 1, and Proposition 1, which says: “The time in which any space is traversed by a body starting from rest and uniformly accelerated is equal to the time in which that same space would be traversed by the same body moving at a uniform speed whose value is one-half the highest and final speed reached during the previous uniformly accelerated motion.” Here, all major magnitudes such as the equal time and the length of space can be measured in an experiment, and therefore, if this deduced consequence can be verified by the observation in a designed experiment, the proposed hypothesis would be verified to a certain extent.

In general, the scientific methodology proposed by Galileo on the new science of motion is termed by later historians as one of “hypothesis-deduction” which is featured by mathematical reasoning and experimental observation.

So, my students and readers, this is how Galileo discovered his new science, and this is also the method which scientists, in spite of not necessarily agreeing with Galileo’s concrete discoveries, have never abandoned in the scientific human endeavor of studying nature ever since. Are you familiar with this method? To what extent are you still using this method in your own work?

On Flight: Bin Song (Part I): https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/02/19/on-flight/.

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College.

A couple of weeks ago, when we discussed the Hindu concept of Moksha, students in the class asked a series of good questions: How can we achieve Moksha? Who can judge one has already achieved Moksha? What shall we do if we do achieve Moksha? As we know, “Moksha” is the religious goal of ancient Hinduism, a goal of final release from the suffering cycle of reincarnation into another divine realm of being, which is thought of by the Upanishads as being achievable via one’s ascetic practice in the forest, and by the Bhagavad Gita as being achievable via fulfilling one’s social duty in an inner state of pure equanimity. In tandem, these texts also give us many beautiful descriptions about how one feels when “Moksha” is achieved. Words such as non-duality, union, equanimity, peace, joy, non-attachment are all used for the descriptions. Using these descriptions, together with some guidance from one’s spiritual mentor such as those Hindu gurus, one can confirm whether and to what extent one has achieved Moksha. Nevertheless, among all the asked questions, we cannot find a clear and easy answer from the texts to the last one: what shall we do if we can safely claim we do achieve Moksha (at least to a certain extent) ?

Interestingly, you can actually replace “Moksha” with any other religious goal envisioned by other religious traditions, ask the same questions, and then, you will find the asked questions actually have addressed a common and crucial aspect of human religious life across virtually all traditions.

For instance, if we replace “Moksha” with “Salvation,” we will find a Christian may be struggled with how she can make sure she will achieve salvation, at least to a certain extent, in this or afterlife, and what she should do if she does make sure of achieving it. The same can be said to the Buddhist goal of “nirvana,” the Ruist/Confucian goal of “obtaining one’s conscientious awareness,” and the Daoist goal of “achieving immortality,” etc. In a word, all major traditions are struggling with understanding a cluster of questions surrounding the tension of “ideal” vs “reality” that is so tangible to one’s spiritual life on a daily basis.

To indicate my general view on this issue, let’s use the two competitive poems written respectively by the founders of the Northern and Southern schools of the Chinese Chan Buddhism, Shen Xiu (606-706 C.E.) and Hui Neng (638-713 C.E.), as an illuminating example.

Shen Xiu was a very educated monk, who was versed in ancient Chinese and Buddhist texts from a very young age, and he was therefore acclaimed by his peers as the most probable person to become the Sixth Patriarch of the Chan school. To prove he had achieved the Buddhist enlightenment and thus compete for the recognition of the Fifth Patriarch as the legitimate heir, Shen Xiu writes:

The body is the bodhi tree
The mind is like a bright mirror’s stand.
At all times we must strive to polish it
and must not let dust collect.

In contrast, Hui Neng was illiterate and could not write any single word when he was put into a position by the Fifth Patriarch to grind rice in the monastery. Hearing what Shen Xiu wrote, Hui Neng responded that:

Bodhi originally has no tree.
The bright mirror also has no stand.
Fundamentally there is not a single thing.
Where could dust arise?

According to the legend recorded by the Platform Sutra, one canonical text of Chinese Chan Buddhism, Hui Neng was confirmed as the really enlightened human being, and he thus inherited the lineage of Chan and became the sixth Patriarch.

So, let’s ask the aforementioned three questions to these two poets, and see which one answers each of them well.

For Shen Xiu, one reaches enlightenment, which is the Buddhist religious goal of being aware of the true reality called “sunyata” (emptiness), through the so-called “gradual realization”: you need to do all sorts of daily practices and disciplines to rid of all dusts on your originally bright Buddha nature; if you continually do so, one day, you will eventually get there. However, for Hui Neng, the spiritual state of being aware of Sunyata is all encompassing. Since Sunyata refers to the interconnection of all beings in the universe, it has its potential “infinite” quality as well. Understood as such, no matter how hard we discipline ourselves according to the method suggested by Shen Xiu, the accumulation of finite means cannot lead to an infinite enlightenment. Therefore, Hui Neng’s poem essentially tells us that all means, though alleged as being able to lead to enlightenment, are by no means the condition of the enlightenment. They are best thought of as a certain kind of “trigger” or “stimulus,” rather than “premise,” and the genuine foundation for one to achieve enlightenment is that our bright Buddha nature is originally and already there. As Hui Neng’s poem says, there is originally no single thing to be attached to, and no dust can blur the original Buddha nature. Therefore, in reliance upon the so-called “sudden” enlightenment, one can achieve her religious goal in any place at any time while getting triggered by any circumstance.

So, for the first question, how can one achieve enlightenment, Hui Neng seems to have given a better answer.

Secondly, who can tell whether one has achieved enlightenment? In the legend, it was the Fifth Patriarch, Hong Ren, who discerned the more enlightened state of Hui Neng from the different poems, and this tells us that only enlightened humans can discern enlightened ones. However, the poems themselves do not address this question, and we can use our best to judge that Shen Xiu’s and Hui Neng’s poems get a tie under this question. The discernment provided by the Fifth Patriarch also speaks to one notable characteristic of Chan Buddhism: the state of enlightenment is deeply experiential, and ultimately beyond any human language can describe. Therefore, the handing-over of Buddhist teaching among generations will mainly rely upon a method called the heart-to-heart transmission, which at least contains two components: a practitioner needs to “get” the Buddhist teaching into her heart by herself at first; and then, she can seek convenient and practical means to inspire other practitioners also to “get” there by themselves. What gets transmitted eventually is not any reified form of Buddhist teachings in any material evidence such as words. Instead, it is the experience of the genuine reality of the world in reliance upon the rediscovery of one’s originally bright Buddha nature.

Finally, what shall we do once we achieve the enlightenment? I have to say, in my view, Shen Xiu’s poem is much better than Hui Neng’s to answer this question. If we more realistically evaluate the everyday condition of human living, we would find that even if we can claim to reach that enlightened state of experiencing something that is infinite, we cannot be so confident to aver that there is a possibility for ordinary human beings to stay in the same state forever. Human life is deeply ambiguous and changing: one enlightened state at one moment may be conducive to ignorance and obscurity at the next, and one seeming setback may be just a sign of another triumph. So, it may be true that we can achieve our religious goal, at least to a certain extent, at a certain moment of our life as it is triggered by a variety of factors, but we still need to diligently do something to maintain that enlightened state. Hui Neng’s poem tells us very little about how to maintain it, while Sheng Xiu’s says that in order to keep our awareness of our originally bright Buddha nature, we need to “strive to polish it and must not let dust collect,” which, in my view, makes a lot of sense.

Therefore, since Shen Xiu and Hui Neng are eventually on a tie regarding their competitive answers to the three important questions, if I am the Fifth Patriarch, I would not just simply appoint Hui Neng as my heir. I may need to wait for some time to see whether they, or a third person, can write a better poem to incorporate the insights from both sides.

In general, my own view on the tension of ideal vs reality in religious matters can be summarized as follows: In order to live a good spiritual human life, we need to balance the two aspects of ideal vs reality in any adopted spiritual lifestyle. On the one hand, we need a goal that can be so sublime that no real human situation can ever fully capture it. In this way, the goal will continually motivate ourselves to better ourselves so that our life never lacks its momentum to move forward. However, the so-envisioned spiritual goal cannot be so high and ethereal that no actual human effort can capture it in any substantial way. In other words, we need some methods, such as meditation, ritual performance, daily human interaction, etc., to taste the sweetness of the spiritual goal to a certain extent in real moments of human life. In this way, the spiritual goal would not have been made completely out of human reach, because otherwise, what is the point for us to practice religion or spirituality at all? However, given the first condition about the sublimity of a spiritual goal, whenever we feel we get there and hence have good reasons to believe that we enjoy the realization of the goal to a certain extent, we also need to constantly remind ourselves that this is a just partial and momentary realization, which is by no means the full manifestation of the ideal in reality. So, eventually, the spiritual state of a human being who has reached the desirable balance would be like this: she would constantly discipline herself to realize her spiritual goal in real life; however, whenever she reaches it, she would tell herself: yes, I realize you, at least to a certain extent, but I just want more.

(A more elaborated discussion of mine on this topic of religious goal vs realities can be checked via my essay on “perfectionism.”)