In a pithy sentence that has been quoted many times since he first wrote it more than three hundred years ago, the English philosopher John Locke declared:
Nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses.
Another great philosopher, Leibniz, came up with a clever, and insightful, reply to Locke:
Nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses
—except the mind itself!
Locke: Nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu.
Leibniz: Nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu,
nisi intellectus ipse.
This invites wonderings on what is known as the mind-body problem:
Is it mind only (idealism), or body only (materialism)?
Does mind emerge from matter, or matter emerge from mind?
Is mind matter, or is matter mind?
A quip to such questions goes as follows:
Never mind, it doesn’t matter.
Buddhists have long held that the relation is one of nonduality.
With this in mind (or in body), we can say that mind and body co-arise, one dependent of the other, in complex unity. Complex because, whereas a simple unity would be sheer identity—mind and body are one, period—the complex unity of nonduality means that their relation can be described as:
Not one. Not two.
This means that neither can stand alone, nor can they totally merge; they stand in mutual requirement, one requiring the other for completion.
Ever buoyant in his way with words, Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, provides a more eloquent, a more nuanced, description of nonduality:
“Though not one, not different; though not different, not the same; though not the same, not many.”
Dogen’s original Japanese:
一にあらざれども異にあらず、異にあらざれども即にあらず、即にあらざれども多にあらず。
Re-arranged, with the three clauses parallel to one another . . .
一にあらざれども異にあらず、
異にあらざれども即にあらず、
即にあらざれども多にあらず。
. . . a pattern is revealed that the Western eye might miss in the original context.
Since I favor four, I will add one line of my own, at the end, to make it a quatrain:
一にあらざれども異にあらず、
異にあらざれども即にあらず、
即にあらざれども多にあらず、
多にあらざれども一にあらず。
Though not one, not different;
though not different, not the same;
though not the same, not many;
though not many, not one.
With this addition to the sentence, note how the beginning and end now mirror each other. The last two words, “not one,” invite a return to reading the opening words and beginning the fourfold sequence anew . . .
Not One, Not Two
不一、不二
HyC