The Blind Man Touches story.VIETNAMESE TRANSLATE ENGLISH BY=THICH CHAN TANH.

  

In the Great Nirvana Sutta by the Indian Dharma Dharma Master, Dharmaraksa, translated into Chinese and the A Hamas Sutta of Buddhism, the story is told:
The elephant and the six blind people
Once there was a wise king philosopher, seeing that his ministers are often conservative with their small understandings, they sent him to a very large elephant and a congenitally blind man, to let them touch the elephant. Then the king asked, "Do you know what an elephant is like?"
- Know! The blind man replies.
- What's the elephant like?
- Elephants seem like a bump. Ivory touches.
- Elephants are like a fan. Touched by the ear.
- Elephants are like rocks. He touched the elephant head.
The person touching the trunk said, "An elephant is like a pestle".
- Elephants are like wooden boxes. The person who touched the elephant's eye said.
- Not. Elephant like a bed. The person who touches the elephant back affirms.
- Follow me the elephant is like a big crate. The palpator touches the elephant.
- Don't argue, elephant is like a rope. Toucher tail confirmed.
The king heard them several controversial blind, felt the expression says:

The blind are large
paintings tell the truth several
elephants, which only a relative
Thi non disagree

We all know this story very well, but perhaps few understand the profound meaning of its philosophy. We, politicians, philosophers, scientists, educators ... and other ordinary people in society are like those blind people, we grop to understand the natural and social world. , providing solutions and applying models for social development. Most of us fall into formalism, or to be more formally ill.

Mathematicians like David Hilbert (1) wanted to build a mathematical castle smoothly, which could use logic to solve everything, but failed, its legacy is New Mathematics and set theory only. a useless burden on students. Physicists like Albert Einstein wanted to come up with a unified field theory to explain all the phenomena in the universe smoothly, but at the end of his life he also failed to complete the work, which until now and Forever after, no one can complete. The theory of logic is widely used today, can be considered the most hasty, is the operating system of computers, but it can not be considered perfect, because sometimes the machine can not be answered. request and is suspended, or most prominently, a notice of impossibility.
The reason why all people fail when they want to use their intellectual intelligence to solve all phenomena in the universe is due to the limit of knowledge. All knowledge falls into formalism, that is, form disease. People use deductive logic to go from one form to another with the perception that they are equal or equal, but never go to the end because form is infinite, always fluctuates in space and time, cannot be affirmed and therefore never understand the whole. This was stated by Kurt Gödel (2) and proved to be "Incompleteness Theorem" published in 1931. This theorem is stated in two parts:
Theorem 1: If a theory is based on a non-contradictory axiomatic system, there are always propositions that cannot be proved nor rejected.
Theorem 2: There does not exist any inference process that proves the non-contradiction of a axiomatic system.
Thousands of years before Kurt Gödel, Buddhism also mentioned this. The Prajnaparamita Sutta says, "Buddhas are not formless, immortal, immortal, immeasurable, immeasurable, unaltered, visually neutral, immeasurable, thoughtless, inanimate; sharp touch of tactile flavor… ”
Translation: The dhammas (all things) have no appearance, no birth, no death, no uncleanness, no increase, no decrease, so in nothingness, no materiality, no feelings like feeling ( contact, thought (imagination), action (motion, activity), consciousness (discrimination), no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, consciousness, no sensory objects is materiality (material), sound (sound), incense (aroma), taste (taste of the tongue), contact (feeling of the body), dharma (object of consciousness) ...
The Buddha explained that the origin of the world, the universe, and everything is due to the predestined relationship, but it is also temporary, not final, that is relative, explaining to ordinary people to understand temporarily, no. can absoluteize. In Bat Nha Tam Kinh, the Buddha negates the conditions (non-conditions) through the above quote, at the same time negates the nature (unnatural) The human mind cannot understand because the whole truth is illogical, without space, time, quantity, all knowledge is useless. Knowledge is only valid in a small, relative context, with space, time, and quantity, and if you want to absoluteize it, you want to establish a theory with universal value across time space only. is illusion. Einstein pursued that illusion, trying to formulate the theory of the Unified School until his death in 1955,
The implication of the Heart Sutra is that the essence of the world is nothing, nothing, we see all kinds of things like paints, creatures, people, cars and houses, etc. This disease Buddhist scriptures called "the posture of idea disclosure" means that the imaginary disease has spread in the world. In fact, the idea of ​​saving the mind is not necessarily a disease, it is a perception that is misguided (because of ignorance) but also a strong and harmless general, it is the use of the Mind, which is also of the Truth. no possession ”, only the attachment to the perception that the perception is 100% true, 100% real without any suspicion is truly a sick and harmful general, Buddhist scriptures call the disease“ before thought ” is stubbornly to be real. This is like a fool who thinks that the phenomena on the computer screen are completely real, unaware that it is virtual. With an elegant,
Because the nature of the world is no, there is no beginning, no end, so all phenomena are on a cycle of samsara, there is no way out. Buddhism calls the cycle of reincarnation "open eyes" that we dream in the middle of the day without notice.
What is the disease form? It is an inherent attachment to form, we are blind to the elephant, the elephant represents the whole truth, our knowledge is a groping from one form to another of that whole. without ever grasping the whole. Examine an example to see what formal disease is like. What is water?
A glass of water for ordinary people is water that can be used for refreshments, washing, washing, for agricultural production, and for chemists, it is H2O, can be classified into two types. Gas is hydrogen and oxygen. If we go further, the structure of a hydrogen atom consists of a nucleus comprising a proton in the center, and an electron particle orbiting at great distances, so the atom is actually empty. Hydrogen has two isotopes in nature, deutérium and tritium. The nucleus of the deutérium has 1 proton and 1 neutron, while the nucleus of tritium has 1 proton and 2 neutrons. Deutérium can combine with oxygen to form heavy water, which is often used as a conditioner in atomic reactors. Tritium combines with oxygen to form super heavy water.
The hydrogen atom and its two isotopes are deutérium and tritium. The atomic structure shows that matter is empty, not as hard as it feels.


Going further into the atomic nucleus we see:



The proton consists of 3 quarks: 2up + 1down

Neutron particles also contain 3 quarks: 1up + 2down
The size of quarks is extremely small. To visualize, we take carbon atoms which are already very small (0.5 nm-nanometer, 1nm = one billionth of a meter), magnified by the size of the globe (magnified by 24 million billion or 24x1015 times). see quark particles less than 5 mm (mm) in size.
If we only see water as water for drinking and living, then we have a formative illness, that is, clinging to a form of matter, like a blind man touching an elephant, unaware that the essence of water is quarks and electrons. But the quark cannot stand alone, meaning it cannot exist independently, and the two quarks join together to form a meson (including 1 quark and 1 anti-quark, this particle only exists one billionth of a second in an object form) The interaction of quarks is very complex, the force connecting them is the strong interaction force exerted by a type of exchange particle, gluon, when separating the two quarks apart, the force is infinitely infinite. the separation is called a confinement phenomenon - and when they get close, this force is zero, the interaction radius of this force is only about one part per million billion meters, or 10-15 m, beyond this distance, The quark particles combine to form a baryon, the two most basic types of baryons - protons and neutrons, collectively called hadrons in the atomic nucleus. It clearly has the meaning of predestination or being destroyed. A single quark particle cannot independently exist, it must have predestined factors combining two or three quarks to produce matter. If quarks are removed, matter disappears. When analyzing atomic structure, it was found that most of the atomic mass lies in the nucleus. In the nucleus, the proton has a mass of 1836 times the electron (electron) and the neutron has an mass of 1839 times the electron. Thus we see the mass of the electron is very modest compared to the nucleus. However, the role of electrons in the mechanism that makes sense of the senses of eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body is very large. All of our sensory perceptions of matter, including the chemistry and physics of each element, are caused by the very fast electron cloud moving around the nucleus, which of course is How you decide to depend on the kernel. So the essence of the feeling is electricity (electrons are negatively charged electrons) that is a kind of magic that is very magical, very clear, very different so that most people and all animals think is real.
Back to the question of what water is, we can only answer superficially that is the essential fluid for living things, used for drinking, living and production. The answer of course is formality. That is the posthumous view, and if we are 100% convinced that the water is real, it is before thought, a very serious form of disease of beings in general and people in particular. It will lead to misery due to birth, aging, sickness, death, to wars due to scrambling for resources, territories, territorial waters, land, houses, properties, to all kinds of natural disasters and disasters. But if we go deep into the bottom of our being, we cannot answer what water really is. Saying that H2O is just a superficial or incomplete form. Saying that a combination of protons, neutrons and electrons is not enough. Say it's a set of quarks and electrons is not necessarily the end, because when detaching quarks as Zhang Baosheng once performed when passing through the wall of the Great Hall of the Beijing People's Great Hall in 1982, matter disappeared completely, becoming void, his body and the wall is gone, he can go through it easily to reappear inside. In short, all of us (except the Buddha and the enlightened Zen masters such as Hue Nang, Don Dien, Han Son, Nguyet Khe ...) are all blind people who touch an elephant, do not know the real elephant how, cannot be determined. That is why the Kinh Kim Cang has the phrase "Ung loves the head of unborn children." physical.
Kurt Gödel's imperfect theorem is a scientific confirmation that human knowledge is limited, cannot reach the whole by analytical mind, one can use the known, logical deduction. the unknown but never reaches the full knowing. However, it is not so that people give up, the experience of Buddhist monks shows that it is possible to attain the whole by ending the thinking, because the inference is the knowledge base, which is the brain. dark clouds obscure the sun, stopping thinking is wiping that cloud away so that the sun of truth will manifest itself. Enlightenment is the escape from samsara, from the vicious circle. Saying escape is just a temporary expression, actually reincarnation is not real, the universe is just a fantasy illusory. Science cannot separate quarks in protons and neutrons because it requires infinite energy, but by the spiritual method, Buddha and Zen masters can do it, some people have supernormal capabilities. special as Truong Bao Thang can do. In doing so, they will understand that the universe is only illusory. Scientists, materialists, on the other hand, are convinced that the cosmic world is real, they are all blind touchers who suffer from ill-conceived illness without knowing it themselves. Precisely because he realized that the universe was not real, the dharmapala was derived from the meaning of the Tripitaka (zh. 唯識 三十 頌, sa. Triṁśikā-vijñaptimātratāsiddhi-kārikā) of the Bodhisattva The Body (世 親 Vasubandhu), wrote the series "The only idealism" that Xuanzang translated into Chinese literature including the summary sentence "Three realms of idealism,
The 6th Patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China, Hui Neng, lived in Tang dynasty, at the same time as the emperor Vo Tac Thien, was one of the most famous people who did that, that is, to realize the whole truth. which Zen called Kien before becoming Buddha (Buddha only means enlightened person). He knew before the day of passing away and told the disciple to leave his body exactly as it was after passing away in the lotus position. That humiliation became indestructible, without any external intervention, until now 1300 years, Hue Nang's indestructible body remains intact, worshiped at Nam Hoa Pagoda near Guangzhou, China. Quoc, together with the indestructible body of Hâm Sơn and Điền Điền. The body of Nguyet Khe (born in 1965) is worshiped at Van Buddha Temple in Hong Kong. The Patriarchs left their indestructible flesh in order to make faith for the next life,END=NAM MO SHAKYAMUNI BUDDHA.( 3 TIMES ).WORLD VIETNAMESE BUDDHIST ORDER=GOLDEN AMITABHA MONASTERY=VIETNAMESE BUDDHIST NUN=THICH CHAN TANH.AUSTRALIA,SYDNEY.21/10/2019.