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version seven. http://demongin.org |
The Sword Saint
What is the body of a rock?
Friday, 2008-10-03 | Koans
| ...some thirteen year old hacker in Finland is going to hand the presidency to Kylie Minogue. You thought the 2004 election was bad, wait until the next one is decided by a customer service rep in New Delhi. |
He thought of Musashi, the Sword Saint, standing in his garden more than three hundred years ago. "What is the 'Body of a rock'?" he was asked. In answer, Musashi summoned a pupil of his and bid him kill himself by slashing his abdomen with a knife. Just as the pupil was about to comply, the Master stayed his hand, saying, "That is the 'Body of a rock'."
-- Eric Van Lustbader
Van Lustbader is an author, mystic and Stuyvesant alum whose work is concerned mainly with what could cursorily but not capriciously be characterized as "warrior mysticism."
Before I say anything about what meaning I take from the passage, I would like to spend some time thinking about and reconsidering what I take the passage to mean; the above passage is simply too semantically dense to be considered without substantial "unpacking" and, in order to unpack, I shall have to do its author the discourtesy of rephrasing and representing the question and the answer to which the majority of the passage is devoted.
The question his first, unnamed character poses is this: "What is the body of a rock?" And the solution his Musashi proposes is a demonstration of his student's willingness to follow his order to commit suicide without hesitation.
I take this question to be another way of asking, "given a thing that is of an irregular shape, what can we say comprises the 'body' or 'main' of this shape? Things with clearly defined appendages suggest a 'body' or 'bulk' to the anatomizing eye: when we look upon a thing without off-shoots, what do we say the body of this thing?" The interrogator already understands the laws of nature--the rules of physics that we learn to interpret with our eyes--that dictate what is the 'pith' and 'core' of a thing and what is merely an appendage, but he wants to know that how to decide such things in the absence of a discernible pattern.
I think also that the question, as it is posed in this Samurai Sunday sort of setting where nothing happens in the physical world that does not have some sort of mystical or philosophical corollary, automatically has metaphorical (i.e. non-literal, non-spatial) implications. The interrogator might as well be asking, "what is the most important idea within a network of mutually informative ideas that is undefined? If there is a 'cloud' of ideas and no great man has yet to legislate that one idea within that nebulous space shall take precedence over his fellows and thus become the idea from which those other ideas proceed and the idea to which they eventually return, what then do we call the 'main' or 'bulk' or 'central' idea?"
Stripped of all that wordiness, the interrogator wants to know how to assign significance and, more critically, importance, if neither the laws of nature nor the laws of man have already done this for him.
In light of this more nuanced question, I think Musashi's answer becomes unavoidable.
Mushashi, the Sword Saint, who knows little of this world that is not part of the training regimen--the Discipline with a capital "D"--answers by demonstrating what he takes to be the 'core' of the discipline: he shows that his student has been trained to comply with the orders of his master without a thought for himself
The Discipline, we are free to assume, has many facets, each of debatable importance and centrality. Musashi tells us, by answering the "what is the body of a rock" question in this way, that this particular facet is, in fact, central. Furthermore, as this facet or aspect of the training is offered to Musashi's interrogator as the indisputable center, certain other necessary conclusions follow.
Namely that the center of a given network of ideas is that one which obliterates all others. Put more simply, the most important idea in a constellation idea is the one that, when thought, casts all others into oblivion; it is the one that must necessarily be thought at the direct expense of all others.
And thus we arrive at the question again: what is the center of a thing without a clearly defined center? It is the single thing within that thing that is ultimately and radically self-nullifying.
In the student's training, the center is the part of the training that destroys the student and thus renders null his efforts and whatever effects his training might have had upon him or the world at large. In the physical object, therefore, the center is the collection of parts of that physical object that drive that object apart, rather than the parts that hold it together. The center is what is held, reluctantly, in place and the appendages are what does the holding.
What is the body of a rock? The body of a rock is that within the rock that is most unlike a rock.
