Cattāri Brahmavihārā

The fact that the Dhamma must needs be communicated by the imperfect medium of language is a fact that I have often averted to and then left behind as I was afraid that such a line of thinking would lead only to further entanglement and no profit. Frankly, I think this may still be the case but I am come now to this place in my practice where I am obligated to take another look.

Surely language is always an approximation of a process in constant motion that, by its nature, lens the appearance of solidity and thingness to whatever it describes. The problem of language becomes even more obvious when speaking of things like wisdom, concentration and the whole gamut of first-person experiences that are often failed by words even before the issue of translation treats its ugly head. And although I won’t attempt to go any further down this rabbit hole for the time being suffice it to say that any attempt to re-word or revise a tradition’s textual/oral corpus without a lived experience of said tradition is folly at best. In other words, although we each need to use a language that resonates with our own conditioning to make the Teaching stick, to do so in a self-imposed vacuum is foolish at best and harmful at worst.

Please excuse my rambling and I promise to try to clean this up at a later date.