MDMD2: Mu

[Dave Monroe]

   "'There is something I must know,' Mason hoarsely whispers, in the tone 
of a lover tormented by Doubts, '-- Have you a soul,-- that is, are yo a 
human Spirit, re-incarnate as a Dog?'
   "The L.E.D. blinks, shivers, nods in a resign'd way.  'You are hardly the 
first to ask.  Travelers return'd from the Japanese Islands tell of certain 
religious Puzzles known as Koan, perhaps the most  fam'd of which concerns 
your very Question,-- whether a Dog hath the nature of the divine Buddha. A 
reply given by a certain very wise Master is, "Mu!"'
   "'Mu,' repeats Mason, thoughtfully.
   "'It is necessary for the Seeker to meditate upon the Koan until driven 
to a state of holy Insanity,-- and I would recommend this to you in 
particular.  But please do not come to the Learned English Dog if it's 
religious Comfort you're after. I may be praeternatural, but I am not 
supernatural.  'Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf?  There is ever an Explanation 
at hand, and no such thing as a Talking Dog,-- Talking Dogs belong with 
Dragons and Unicorns....'" (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 22)

"The L.E.D. blinks," L.E.D. = Light Emitting Diode ...

And recall the discussion of Metempsychosis just prior ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=875&sort=date

But from Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid 
(New York: Basic Books, 1979), Ch. VIII, "A MU Offering," pp. 231-45 ...

Achilles:  My favorite path to Zen is through the short, fascinating,
   and weird Zen parables called "koans."

Tortoise:  What is a koan?

Achilles:  A koan is a story about Zen masters and their students.
   Sometimes it is like a riddle; other times like a fable; and
   other times like nothing you've ever heard before.

[...]

Tortoise:  I would like to hear a koan or two.

Achilles:  And I would like to tell you one--or a few.  Perhaps I
   should begin with the most famous one of all.  Many centuries ago,
   there was a Zen master names Joshu, wholived to be 119 years old.

Tortoise:  A mere youngster!

Achilles:  By your standards, yes.  Now one day while Joshu and
   another monk wer standing together in the monastery, a dog
   wandered by.  The monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have Buddha-
   nature, or not?"

Tortoise:  Whatever that is.  So tell me--what did Joshu reply?

Achilles:  'MU'.

Tortoise:  'MU'?  What is this 'MU'?  What about the dog?  What
   about Buddha-nature?  What's the answer?

Achilles:  Oh, but 'MU' is Joshu's answer.  By saying 'MU', Joshu
   let the other monk know that only by not asking such questions
   can one know the answer to them.

Tortoise:  Joshu "unasked" the question.

Achilles:  Exactly! (p. 233)

See also here ...

Reps, Paul and Nyogen Senazki.
   Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen
   and Pre-Zen Writings.  Boston: Tuttle, 1957.

Two Zen Classics: Mumonkan and Hekganroku.
   Trans. Katsuki Sekida.  Ed. A.V. Grimstone.
   New York: Weatherhill, 1977.  27-30.

But to continue from Hofstadter, GEB, Ch. IX, "Mumon and Godel," pp. 246-74 
...

"... most likely, causing bewilderment is its precise purpose, for ehen one 
is in a bewildered state, one's mind does begin to operate nonlogically, to 
some extent.  Only by stepping outside of logic, so the tehory goe, can one 
make the leap to enlightenment.  But what is so bad about logic?  Why does 
it prevent the leap to enlightenment?" (p. 251)

   "To answer that, one needs to understand something about what 
enlightenment is.  Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would 
be: transcending dualism.  Now ahat is dualism?  dualism is the conceptual 
division of the world into categories.  Is it possible to transcend this 
very natural tendency? ...  But the breaking of the world into categories 
takes place far below the upper strata of thought; in fact, dualism is just 
as much a perceptual division of the world into categories as it is a 
conceptual divison....
   "At the core of dualism, according to Zen, are words--just plain words.  
The use of words is inherently dualistic, since each word represents, quite 
obviously, a conceptual category.  Therefore, a major part of Zen is the 
fight against reliance on words.  To combat the use of words, one of the 
best devices is the koan, where words are so deeply abused that one's mind 
is practically left reeling ... .  Therefore it is perhaps wrong to say that 
the enemy of enlightenment is logic: rather, it is dualistic, verbal 
thinking.  In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception.  As 
soon as you perceive an object, you draw a line [!] between it and teh rest 
of the world; you divide the world, artificially, into parts, and you 
thereby miss the Way." (p. 251)

Cf. Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar" (1923) ...

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-ancedote.html

And there's an awful lot of that "conceptual division of the world"  going 
on in M&D (and elsewhere, cf., e.g., "projection" in Lot 49, "pornographies" 
in GR), no?  The Enlightenment vs. enlightenment?  See  as well ...

Dewey, Joseph.  "The Sound of One Man Mapping:
   Wicks Cherrycoke and the Eastern (Re)solution."
   Pynchon and Mason & Dixon. Ed. Brooke Horvath and
   Irving Malin.  Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000.  112-131.

But I gotta run, so ...

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