Buddhist scholar John McRae announces what he calls the first law of Zen studies:
“It’s not true, and therefore it’s more important.” That is, historical events are trivial in comparison with how legends and myths live in the popular consciousness.1
And Whitehead chimes in with this:
But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.2
For those who may be wondering about “shmue,” Leo Rosten explains in The Joys of Yiddish (320-21):
“sh- and shm- are prefatory sounds, of mockery or dismissal, that ‘pooh-pooh’ the word they prefix. To negate or deride the meaning of a word, the word is repeated—but with shm- prefixed to the repetition. ‘The mayor? Mayor-shmayor, it’s his wife who runs the show.’ Sh- is the introductory signal to a rich symphony of disesteem.”
Mrs. Siegel confided to her neighbor that her son was now seeing a psychoanalyst. “And the doctor says my Marvin is suffering from an Oedipus complex!” “Oedipus-Shmoedipus,” scoffed her neighbor, “so long as he loves his mother.”
Notes
1 John M. McRae, “The Antecedents of Encounter Dialogue in Chinese Ch’an Buddhism,” in The Koan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, Edited by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright, p. 74.
2. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 259.
HyC