One day in a public talk, with Young translating (Young began his monastic training at Mount Kōya south of Osaka and speaks fluent Japanese), the Rōshi asked an unusual question, “Do you know what the number one is?” Before the baffled audience could respond, he answered, “The number one is that which has the number zero as its content.” He went on, “Do you know what the number two is?” and again answered his own question, “The number two is that which has the number one as its content. Do you now what the number three is?” He continued in this vein, and as he did, Young, something of a math geek, had a revelation.
The Rōshi was articulating a fundamental dynamic of consciousness, one no scientist has yet reported, but has been described in slightly different language by Buddhists for over two thousand years. In the Rōshi’s way of seeing things, each sensory moment emerges when an empty source (Zero) polarizes into an expansive force and a contractive force. Between them, these two powers shape each nanosecond of perception. Again and again they mutually cancel and reunite, pulsing sensory reality into existence, creating ever-richer states of Zero that experienced meditators can learn to observe and even to ride (Young once told me this accounts for the bouncy vitality and spontaneity of some Zen monks).
Young realized the Rōshi’s exposition was remarkably similar to the modern foundation of mathematics known as “set theory.” And yet the Rōshi knew nothing of math – his 19th century education was essentially feudal. When Young pointed out this similarity, there was a long pause before his teacher eventually replied, in an unimpressed Zen deadpan, “Ahh… so the mathematicians have seen that far, eh?”
awesome.
