Book Peek: Words vs. Truth

A draft chapter from my book-in-progress

From the Pure Land has crossed the 1,000-follower milestone. If you’ve been reading the posts and would like to get them regularly in your email inbox, click the button below. If you choose the free option, you’ll get all of the regular posts—five-minute reads roughly four times a week. If you choose to pay $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll also receive the longer pieces I’ve been releasing on Sundays. If you can’t afford that but would like to read the “book peeks,” send an email to melpine@substack.com. You don’t need to explain your financial situation.

These longer posts, like the one below, are draft sections of the book I’ve been working on, tentatively titled The New Middle Way: A Buddhist Path Between Secular and Ossified. Everything I plan and write now is tentative. It’s a long way from a final book. Today’s draft is tentatively Chapter Seven.

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Moses, Tablets, Words, and the Kingdom of God

When Moses approached the Israelites carrying the Ten Commandments after spending forty days alone with God on Mount Sinai, he found them dancing around a golden calf. In their boredom and fear that he wouldn’t return, they decided to try worshiping another god. Moses was so angry that he smashed the inscribed tablet God had given him and ordered the Israelites to melt the calf and drink water mixed with sand.

When Moses told God what his people had done, God instructed him to carve another tablet and return up the mountain for God to inscribe it. Then God added:

Chill out, man! Do you think what I gave you, and by extension your people, over 40 days and nights could ever be summed up in words inscribed on tablets? Words and objects can’t ever convey what I gave you.

—A Variation of a Famous Bible Story

I’ll thank (or blame) Lama Surya Das for the story above. I heard him tell a story similar to it during a retreat in 2016. He said it was from Jewish lore, but I have tried and failed repeatedly to find it. So that’s my paraphrase. On second thought, you can thank Lama Surya and blame me. He didn’t make me tell the story.

What did Moses do for forty days and nights on the mountain with no other members of the human realm around? Did he meditate, find his pure awareness, sense his nondual oneness with all? Did his return to the rowdy Israelites jolt him out of it and spark his anger? Did he need to return to the mountain for a refresher?

As an aside, I wondered why biblical stories often say things like “40 days and 40 nights.” Why not just “40 days”? They didn’t have resort hotels in those days to charge the customer for an extra day. One interesting nugget I found in my research was that specifying days and nights is a way of saying what went on over that period covered all aspects of life, visible and hidden, active and restful. Great conditions for nature of mind meditation.

I could go on and find more symbolism in the biblical story. I could find ways to interpret the idea of an external god figure and commandments carved into stone, but that’s not my thing.

I’m telling the story as a vivid reminder of how words cannot express what’s holy. “God” is a case in point. I strongly suspect that many people who consider themselves Christian, Muslim, or Jewish have a personal sense of what the word means to them—a personal sense different from the divine sovereignty described in the Bible and Quran.

A divine sovereign is also inconsistent with the Buddhist core teaching of specific conditionality—all things arise from causes and conditions and contribute to the chain of causes and conditions. There is no this without that, and without this, there would be no that. So a god who’s separate from us and calls the shots doesn’t fit.

That leaves room for a sense of god who is not a divine sovereign. I’ve heard Thich Nhan Hanh say:

I know the address of the Kingdom of God. And the zip code, too. There are here and now.

And

It’s OK when you are at the start of your religious practice to think that god is out there. But eventually, you understand that god is in here.

When I hear a Buddhist teacher use the G word, it evokes in me a concept that I believe is consistent with Buddhism, panentheism (belief in a god that’s part of us), and the more woo-woo findings of quantum science.

In Buddhist terms, we all have a Buddha Nature. As I understand the concept, we all have the same Buddha Nature, but we don’t all share one Buddha Nature. The analogy I’ve heard used is a clear, pure lake. You and I each have a cup of water from the lake. We have the same water, but we don’t share the same water.

Our bodies and our egos are impermanent, but our Buddha Nature—our pure awareness, our nature of mind—is not. And all things are so intricately interconnected that we are one or might as well be.

That’s why I don’t cringe when I hear the G word. Although the Buddha is not a god, and Buddha Nature is not godlike, when I consider the interconnected web of our Buddha Nature, I perceive something that could be called a form of panentheism.

Then, there are visionaries combining science and philosophy and coming up with similar theories—that our minds or consciousnesses are part of something greater. I’ve already used too many words for a reality that can’t be described in words, so I’ll just refer back to Federico Faggin and Bernardo Kastrup. If you can spare two-and-a-half hours, you can watch them in discussion here.

But remember what God told Moses, and don’t get hung up on the words and concepts. You’ll find what’s holy in your equivalent of 40 days and 40 nights on Mount Sinai.

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Even truth is a semantic property, according to Buddhist philosopher Mark Sideritz, author of Buddhism as Philosophy. Or he might say that truths are a semantic property. In discussing the two truths doctrine, he invented the idea of an impermeable membrane between the languages of absolute truth and relative truth.