Looking for the source of an old adage

Pfhorrest November 27, 2020 at 22:29 1950 views 4 comments

There’s an old adage that a philosophy professor related to me once, and I'd love to find the proper original version of it and its source, but so far the Googles do nothing, and I'm wondering if anyone here might be able to point me in the right direction.

It went something like “Before one walks the path of enlightenment, tables are tables and tea is tea. As one walks the path of enlightenment, tables are no longer tables and tea is no longer tea. After one has walked the path of enlightenment, tables are again tables, and tea is again tea.”

Comments (4)

Pantagruel November 27, 2020 at 22:41 #475131 0 likes

Reply to Pfhorrest I thought that was a zen buddhist adage.

Pfhorrest November 27, 2020 at 22:50 #475135 0 likes

Reply to Pantagruel It sure sounds like one, but I'm not sure if I'm remembering it accurately, or if there's anymore specific source than just "Zen Buddhists".

Wayfarer November 27, 2020 at 23:08 #475143 0 likes

It’s a version of a Zen koan. The original is something like ‘ Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.” That is attributed to Dogen, who is the founder of the S?t? Zen school.

The gist of the meaning is that the Zen student starts off a naive realist - ‘mountains really are mountains’. Then on learning the truth of ??nyat? (emptiness, dependent origination) the student discovers that mountains have no intrinsic reality, that they are ‘appearances only’. But, very much in the spirit of S?t? Zen, in particular, having discovered this, one abandons all expectation of them being something other than what they simply are, so in the end they’re mountains again, although implicitly one’s understanding has been refined by the experience of satori such that one sees them ‘as they truly are’.

The pop singer Donovan wrote a song about this koan, ‘first there is a mountain’. The San Francisco Zen Centre, founded by Shunryu Suzuki in 1969, is a S?t? Zen centre and has been central the dissemination of Dogen’s teachings through the wider culture. Dogen’s main philosophical book, Shobogenzo, is widely regarded as a classic of Japanese classical literature.

Pfhorrest November 28, 2020 at 01:09 #475189 0 likes

Reply to Wayfarer Thanks so much! Should have guessed you would be the one to ask about this.