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Posted by rat on 3/29/2010, 7:25 am, in reply to "Re: Luther and wu wei"
173.79.216.x
--Previous Message--
:
:
: --Previous Message--
: Martin Luther: "All have sinned and are
: justified freely, without their own works
: and merits."
:
: I think we can find some "apophatic
: value" in this, maybe even a lot. The
: sin part is not too useful to me. I cannot
: sense anything that I could coherently
: characterize as "sin." Sin from
: one perspective might we goodness from
: another.
:
: "Justified" is useful, I take it
: to mean "worthy." It is my sense
: that a person can realize her/himself to be
: worthy, without having to have done anything
: good. (And in fact I cannot find anything to
: characterize as coherently "good."
: It might be good from one point of view, and
: not another.)
:
: �without their own works and merits� is
: quite significant.
:
: If a person has the realization that she/he
: is unconditionally worthy, she/he will
: experience mystical ecstasy. As a
: side-effect, she will treat the rest of us
: very nicely. But if she thinks she needs to
: be good, in order to be a worthy being, she
: will not (according to this model) realize
: mystical ecstasy. The irony: She treats us
: worse when she thinks that to be worthy, she
: has to treat us well.
:
:
: Rat, worthy...of what? Worth by what
: measure?
:
Hi Joseph
Worthy by our gut feeling regarding what behavior we think is worthy, and what is unworthy. We generally think, for example, that the Buddha is worthy/noble, and that a serial murderer is unworthy/ignoble.
Zhuangzi says 以道觀之，物無貴賤；以物觀之，自貴而相賤
Yi dao guan zhi, wu wu gui jian, yi wu guan zhi, zi gui er xiang jian.
"From the dao's view no creature is worthy nor mean, from a creature's view it is worthy and others are mean."
The daoguan here has an archetypal dynamic that is not too different from Luther's formulation, although it does not depend on an ultimate salvation.
love,
rat
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"The Tao is basically utterly open. Utter openeness has no substance. It ends in endlessness, begins in beginninglessnes".
-Li Daoqun
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