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Give your hardest question! :D
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You are up high in a tree hanging from a branch with your teeth; your arms and legs are bound. Someone appears under the tree with a gun and asks, 'Why did Bodhidharma come to china?' If you do not answer, the man will shoot and you'll die. If you open your mouth to answer, you will fall and die. How do you stay alive?
AKA: Mumonkan - Case 5: Kyogen's "Man Up a Tree"
Mu....
Well, if I can support by body weight with just the strength of my bite I might have superpowers. So I try to communicate telepathically or shoot laser beams out of my eyes at him.
I would say "what the heck you asking me questions at this time? Can't you see I am stuck up in a tree hanging by my mouth? Help me out of this damn tree"...THUNK. (now hopefully I am very lucky and survive)
Scratch that. My arms are bound. I'd explode if I couldn't talk with my hands
The answer is that there is no answer. It is an illustration of how confined we are, how we imprison our Minds and restrict our views of self... open your mouth? It doesn't matter. Keep your mouth closed? It doesn't matter.
It's a bit like the question I posed earlier in the thread, that begins "imagine you are in a room..."
Escaping from the possibility of being trapped and drowning involves thinking outside the box.
The logical conclusion was to stop imagining.
The solution to this dilemma is along the same lines.
Hanging by your teeth or not, the solution is ethereal, because the problem is ethereal.
You're Italian. I told you we must be related.
Woops, you opened your mouth! you're dead!
There is an answer. If you don't give it, the teacher won't allow you to progress to the next koan!
Aw. You spoil all my fun. An' there I was, thinkin' I was so wise, an' shit...
@Kerome
My answer had two parts.
One started with " truth is..."
and the other started with "synthesize"
since i said those words from an inspired state of mind
i implore you to look at them again
Because the Romans were savages who curated their specific brand of Emperor-god Worship very meticulously, and could not tolerate alternate narratives. Is my best guess for such a moment in time that has long passed.
First is art. The tool is also art.
The question that takes forever to ask is the longest question.
The question that takes the most water to soften is the hardest question.
How can suffering be overcome?
Hmm and what question is that ?
I smell a lot of Bovine scatology here... someone trying to be mystically clever and failing.
Dysmally.
@Sova, what exactly is your point, in this exercise?
Save energy.
Depends on one's particular conditioning, don't you find? If the natural state of the mind is unobstructed, what gives your mind the most "solidness" ? Likely for many of us it is the thought of permanence, or the conceptual framework of permanence that anticipates structures that are built from compounded/multiclasped phenomena lasting as if they were suitable perches for ever and ever a men.
Permanence is therefore probably the biggest hard question, and this could be paralleled with the Buddha's speech when he states that "Of all the footprints and trackprints, the impression left by the elephant is supreme, likewise of all the various topics and subjects of meditation, contemplation of death leaves the deepest impression" -- an always untimely transition unless we accept its inevitability and seek refuge in abodes more permanent than flesh and blood.
Is the mind rigid and inflexible? Is it pliant and gatherable? Is it diluted and scattered? Is it collected like a dew drop?
The toughest/hardest concept to wear out
is the one that assumes
For on the basis of unsupporting information
the assuming mind arises
the assuming mind that separates
the waves of experience from the mind experiencing
and draws lines of identity
where mere functionality meets sensuality
It takes courage to ask, "who am i?"
No it doesn't.
It takes courage to find out.
QED. Bovine Scatology.
"A Fool is known by a multitude of words".
So are you saying that by answering the hardest questions you are attempting to help us cope with our inner notions of permanence? I’d think that people need to be open to that... that it should be questions from the heart that are being answered, and not just questions as puzzles.
An interesting point, but if you have to keep wearing out concepts to reach a state of dispassion, then you will likely be busy for quite a long time. The mind’s concept generation machine is of near infinite ingenuity.
If I am
so smart (allegedly) ...
Why aren't I enlightened ...
Well as I understand it, enlightenment is something beyond the mind. So being smart doesn’t necessarily help, rather it hinders because you are more entranced by the mind and have more difficulty letting go of it.
Given that I think @sova is just going through a minor phase of being a bit of a smartass, and that the erratic and cryptic responses haven't really done anything to either endear him to people or address the point of the thread (which seemed, and still seems vague, aimless and pointless) I think the most favourable option now would just be to quietly shut the door on this one, and go about our business of just being Mindful, in the Moment and Attentive.
Thanks to all who contributed responses and input.
And @sova? Think twice, before posting once, ok?