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incomplete its accomplished insights, in the end, is surely preferable to warfare,
unemployment, and homelessness; starvation and bloodshed, doomed social
Utopias and the continued betrayal of paradise by the universality of pain and suffering. In all of its Sino-Japanese allusions to the great disconnect, the so-called
hosshi, or “breakthrough koan”—a staple of Rinzai discipline—aims to provide
sufficient insight through sustained concentration that can literally merge all dialectic into a unison that gets beyond these overwhelming futilities.
47.5 Ultimate Impetus
What distinguishes the Shussan Shaka impetus, the personalities in whom the
re- emergence or obtaining of wisdom occurs, is the unambiguous attempt to solve a
significant problem. It refers, ultimately, to a nuts-and-bolts philosophy of compassion. A connection from the ascetic wilds—characterized in every version of the
wilderness and the endless landscape affiliations, biosemioses, histories of the idea
of nature—to the autobiographical awakening that can be discerned in every great
and legendary personality, whether Buddha, Christ, or a Rembrandt. At that juncture the Self becomes painfully aware of something greater than him/herself, and in
that perception may go on by turns to understand the challenge of liberation; the
infinite individuals and souls whose lives truly are at stake, whether looking down
into the populated valleys beneath a wild cliff, or out a studio window on to the
crowded market ways of Renaissance Amsterdam. At its undeviating core, this is the
philosophy—and a potent one—of biological interdependency.
47 Sakya Coming Out of His Mountain Retreat
incomplete its accomplished insights, in the end, is surely preferable to warfare,
unemployment, and homelessness; starvation and bloodshed, doomed social
Utopias and the continued betrayal of paradise by the universality of pain and suffering. In all of its Sino-Japanese allusions to the great disconnect, the so-called
hosshi, or “breakthrough koan”—a staple of Rinzai discipline—aims to provide
sufficient insight through sustained concentration that can literally merge all dialectic into a unison that gets beyond these overwhelming futilities.
47.5 Ultimate Impetus
What distinguishes the Shussan Shaka impetus, the personalities in whom the
re- emergence or obtaining of wisdom occurs, is the unambiguous attempt to solve a
significant problem. It refers, ultimately, to a nuts-and-bolts philosophy of compassion. A connection from the ascetic wilds—characterized in every version of the
wilderness and the endless landscape affiliations, biosemioses, histories of the idea
of nature—to the autobiographical awakening that can be discerned in every great
and legendary personality, whether Buddha, Christ, or a Rembrandt. At that juncture the Self becomes painfully aware of something greater than him/herself, and in
that perception may go on by turns to understand the challenge of liberation; the
infinite individuals and souls whose lives truly are at stake, whether looking down
into the populated valleys beneath a wild cliff, or out a studio window on to the
crowded market ways of Renaissance Amsterdam. At its undeviating core, this is the
philosophy—and a potent one—of biological interdependency.
47 Sakya Coming Out of His Mountain Retreat