What It Means to Be Bound in a Cave
In the second part of Buddhist Revolution, I turn to greed: seeking, wishing, and desire. Merely saying “abandon greed” is useless. Someone who enjoys earning money, falling in love, or pursuing a goal needs to know why seeking becomes a problem and how one can be freed from desire. In Buddhism, the why and the how always matter.
I begin with the first half of the opening verse of the Cave Octad Discourse: “Bound in a cave and covered by a multitude of things, the hardened person is immersed in delusion.” The latter half continues that such a person is far from release and therefore cannot easily abandon worldly desires. The cave is not simply a rocky cavern. It is like the well inhabited by the proverbial frog: the narrow world of what I have experienced and learned, the framework through which I see. To be covered by a multitude of things is to be encased in the shell of views accumulated through experience and learning.
A flexible person can meet something different and say, “That, too, may be possible,” accepting what is new and changing. A hardened person becomes angry merely because something differs from their own thought and declares it wrong. That is delusion, inverted dreaming, captivity to appearances, and attachment to views. Reality stands one way while I refuse to look and dream it in reverse.
Why Can I Not See the Beam in My Own Eye?
The problem is that I, too, think, “I am not like that.” I readily call another rigid person an old fogey while believing myself flexible and eager to learn. I also harden unless I remain continually awake and attentive. To be flexible, I have to know the color of the lens over my eye and where I have become rigid, yet that is extraordinarily difficult.
Misunderstanding and illusion have a crucial feature: before I notice them, I do not know that they are misunderstanding or illusion. That is also why the speck in another’s eye is easy to see while the beam in my own remains invisible. The instant I recognize it as a shell and a lens, I can say, “Ah, that was a misunderstanding. I was thinking absurdly instead of seeing the fact,” and the shell crumbles. Before that recognition, however, the shell surrounding me appears to be the normal world itself.
Is It Insolent to Hold a Combat Boot While Polishing It?
A story from my younger brother’s military service shows this clearly. In his company, privates and privates first class were taught that holding a combat boot while polishing it was insolent. Soldiers without seniority had to put their boots on the floor and bend down to polish them; only corporals and sergeants could hold them and work comfortably. My brother accepted this as obvious military etiquette and would likely have taught the same rule to his juniors.
Then he visited the company next door in the very same battalion and saw a private holding a boot while polishing it. He was shocked. In that company, holding the boot was considered proper, while senior soldiers comfortably left theirs on the floor. The custom was exactly reversed not in another region or division, but in the adjacent company. Only then could he see that “holding a boot is insolent” was not a fact but merely his company’s convention.
When we encounter an opposing practice, two reactions are possible. One is to let the difference crack the shell of our custom. The other is to declare, “That company is wrong and strange,” and harden further. With the first response, a soldier who later becomes the senior man can discard an unimportant rule, allowing new privates to live under a changed convention. With the second, people keep mistaking convention for fact and truth and continue the oppression.
The Hijab, Scripture, and a Custom That Suppresses Freedom
How combat boots are polished is a comic example, but the same structure can grow into an oppression that kills. In Iran, the state enforced an interpretation requiring women to wear the hijab. After a woman detained for not wearing it died, citizens and young people rose to demand freedom. Even when the government blocked the internet and social media, young Iranians used VPNs to see freer cultures, so they could recognize that compulsory hijab was not a law of nature but one custom.
Someone may say, “Why not simply wear it?” The issue, however, is not one piece of cloth; it is the state’s coercive suppression of an individual’s freedom. Structurally, it is like arresting and killing people over whether a combat boot is held or left on the floor while being polished. The Quran can be interpreted in different ways. Absolutizing one interpretation and enforcing it letter by letter becomes fundamentalism and scriptural supremacy. We must not act mechanically merely because words appear in scripture. It is as though old fogeys sit in government, unable to reconsider their own interpretation even after seeing other ways of life.
The Nomads Seen by Xuanzang—and Xuanzang’s Own Lens
The monk Xuanzang, the historical model for the monk in Journey to the West, traveled to India for seventeen years and returned to Tang China. Around 645, Emperor Taizong of Tang was leading a vast army in war against Goguryeo. Xuanzang brought Buddhist texts home and translated them, becoming the great representative of the “new translations” contrasted with Kumārajīva’s “old translations.” Having seen many countries, peoples, political systems, and cultures, Xuanzang was ordered by the emperor to report on the Western Regions. Xuanzang completed the resulting report, the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, in one year and seven months.
Xuanzang traveled along the Silk Road and steppe routes, entering Gandhāra and India, and recorded the customs of the nomadic peoples he met. He observed that distinctions between noble and lowborn, chief and commoner, were not sharply ordered and that women’s words were respected. He described this in language suggesting that “the status of men falls.” To modern eyes it may look like gender equality; to Xuanzang, formed by Tang customs and a Confucian social order, it appeared as a lowering of male rank.
He also recorded cremation, mourning periods without fixed duration, grieving by cutting the face and ears and shearing the hair, and the slaughter of many animals to console the spirit of the dead. These practices may look strange through the lens of an agricultural society, but in a nomadic society livestock inevitably serve as primary wealth and sacrificial offerings. Xuanzang preserved much objective information, yet phrases such as “the status of men falls” reveal his own views and the lens of his age. Merely seeing another culture does not automatically shatter one’s shell. If difference is judged as error, one’s cave hardens further.
Buddhism Is Not a Religion for Fixing Other People
Before seeing an alternative, it is difficult to notice that I am mistaken. Yet I cannot directly experience every contrary case in the world. Even the rules of a card game may differ in the next town; I cannot travel throughout the world and universe to inspect everything. One or two experiences in which a convention breaks must therefore lead me to infer that many thoughts I have not yet tested may be similar. Human beings cannot learn or awaken without heuristics. To say, “I am a frog in a well, and the Buddha and Jesus were also frogs in wells,” means recognizing that there are worlds I have not seen.
This is why Buddhism teaches hoegwang banjo, turning the light around to illuminate oneself. Before blaming young people for being strange, I should return to myself and ask whether the ways of “my day” were merely conventions. Buddhism is not a religion for fixing other people. It breaks the shell of my own views, releases the suffering produced by them, and helps me see correctly the world I had been seeing wrongly.
At First, We Must See and Observe Directly
We cannot crack every shell through inference from the outset. A Buddhist story tells of a mother who asked the Buddha to revive her dead child. He told her to find a house untouched by death. Going from house to house, she found that every household had lost someone and realized that her child’s death could not be the sole exception. Reality is harsh, but if we cannot see reality as it is, we cannot escape needless suffering.
When someone asks whether prayers can send a deceased parent who did many harmful things to a better realm, the Buddha tells them to throw a stone into a river and make it rise through prayer. No amount of prayer makes the stone float. The Buddha’s teaching is closer to “Look; observe” than to “Believe my authority.” When contrary facts confront me, I can reject them because I dislike them, or turn the light back upon myself, say, “I was caught here,” and break the frame. That is where practice begins.
Rice Bowls and Drinking Customs Also Contain Caves
In Japan, lifting a rice bowl while eating is proper etiquette, and leaving it on the table may be judged rude. In Korea, holding the bowl can itself be considered improper, and the bowl is expected to remain on the table. Neither rule is inherently right; they are different conventions. Just as Xuanzang revealed his lens in recording nomads, we quickly call an unfamiliar custom primitive or wrong.
In Korea, a son who smokes with his father may be judged ill-mannered, whereas in Japan smoking together may not be treated as a serious issue; conversely, there may be greater reluctance for father and son to drink together. Alcohol and tobacco do not determine by themselves what counts as respect within a relationship. These are all conditioned human rules, yet we grasp them as natural law. We must recognize that we are bound in the narrow well and cave formed by what we have seen, learned, and practiced.
Negative Emotion Reveals My Lens
There is another opening through which I can notice my shell besides directly seeing another culture: the moment negative emotion appears because something catches in the mind. During university, before I had a girlfriend, I became depressed every Christmas and year-end season. Outwardly I cried, “Couples, go to hell; singles, heaven!” and spent the night with male friends, but inwardly I envied lovers holding hands, exchanging gifts, and going on dates. I was captive to the thought, “I need a girlfriend in order to be happy at Christmas.”
That thought was not an eternal truth. It was something I learned in a short period from media, films, and television. Having a girlfriend may bring something good, but it also means losing some of the freedom of being alone. To gain one thing is to lose another, yet I looked only at the side I wanted and suffered over what was absent. Five hundred or a thousand years ago, lovers did not necessarily walk city streets in pairs on Christmas as they do now. When anger, sadness, resentment, or another painful emotion arises, I can ask, “What thought is making me suffer?” The lens normally hidden from view then becomes visible. Emotion is the moment when the conceptual shell surrounding me protrudes into the open.
What Is Taken for Granted Becomes Invisible
A person rejoices upon obtaining what they wanted, yet soon takes it for granted. A child who receives a desperately desired toy plays happily for a day or two, then puts it in storage and never looks at it. Once familiar, we cannot even see that it is good. Conversely, only after losing a finger do we know how precious it was, and only after catching a cold do we understand how good the healthy body before the cold had been.
The same thing happens when a person enters the military, experiences the absence of their parents, and returns as a devoted child. While living with their parents, care seems automatic; only after learning that other people do not treat them as parents do does the relationship become visible. Whatever is familiar—good or bad—is hard to notice. The value of what I have, my illusions and misunderstandings, and the shell of my views all disappear from sight when they become ordinary. This is how a human being remains immersed in delusion and inverted dreaming. Today’s conclusion is simple: what is taken for granted becomes invisible.
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