more uncertainty

Well, gentle readers, I have come to an inconclusion.

Let me say this, when people feel certain, it can lead to violence.


It appears my new Nordic friends are practitioners of Falun Gong (which, apparently has really been known as Falun Dafa this whole time) the Chinese crackdown upon which we heard so much about in the waning years of the Clinton administration. (By the way, I invite any new gentle readers from Scandinavia to feel free to browse the archives—December 2005 should do it. Just scroll down past all the good stuff.)

Upon the suggestion of my mysterious benefactors, I did some research on the Falun Dafa. I was a little put off by this warning from Master Li.

"On the surface, Zhuan Falun is not elegant in terms of language. It might even not comply with modern grammar. If I were to use modern grammar to organize this book of Dafa, however, a serious problem would arise wherein though the structure of the book’s language might be standard and elegant, it would not encompass a more profound and higher content. This is because modern, standardized terminology cannot express the guidance of Dafa at different high levels and the manifestation of the Fa at each level; neither is it able to bring about practitioners’ transformation of benti and gong, or other such fundamental changes. "

As someone who feels about the present active participle the way some feel about fuel injectors or fantasy football, this was hard to accept from the leader of a new ancient world-life view. Now certainly the Judeo-Christian scriptures are no example of polished prose, and when the spirit moves, I guess there is no time to run scripture by an editor. However, the idea that somehow grammar makes things less intelligible is my main concern.



See Joel's blog for an interesting discussion of this symbol.
I have never been comfortable with the idea of enlightenment. This may be due to my somewhat strict Calvinist upbringing or my general inability to really become functionally any more proficient at life than I was as a third grader. The enlightenment project has always smacked me a little of arrogance. For instance, although Voltaire may have said, "As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities," it seems that atheists have had just as good a track record in this matter as any religious order. Of course, as a "Westerner," who was taught that Voltaire was somehow a godless secularist AND a great thinker, I am probably most uncomfortable with the idea of religious enlightenment. I would imagine that an Eastern way of expressing the same concern would be to say, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

Anyways, I guess that my mind is not totally closed to this new way of thinking, especially if it is merely a philosophy instead of a full-blown religious doctrine. However, I already have enough Christian dogma to wrestle with, I don't need to come up with a tortured apologia for eating meat.