There is this calm in that attitude, and frankly I envy it a bit. Everything is clear. There are few if any ambiguities. The pains of confusion are gone, not present. Life is a simple matter.
It seems to me we all want to live this way, and for my part I wish him well. It is just that I can see myself traveling from place to place and group to group, seeing again and again and again an absolute certainty about how to live, and what to do, but each group disagreeing on many points, large and small.
I think we naturally seek certainty as a shelter from the wind. It truly is a resting place in a restless world. We seek both absolute truths, and to derive from them absolute duties and identities. It is no wonder that Plato sought the unchanging in his highly chaotic world, and that Aristotle put it down in writing, or tried to.
But our shelters are also our cages. As any long time readers I have may know, I am more or less a Buddhist. What the Buddha wanted from us was movement in a concrete direction, AWAY from a static self. He wanted to break us all into small pieces. I wrote in my journal the other day that that was the reason he posited–at least in my understanding–that both time and space are discontinuous. They consist in pieces he called dharmas. It is far easier to break things–or take them apart, if you will– if they are not in one piece to begin with.
And it is interesting that he used this word. I don’t know the history, but is the Buddhadharma itself not a piece, a broken shard, of some truth beyond words, beyond form? Did it not fall from somewhere, after being condemned to specificity?