More water...

I generally like Brad Warner's blog posts; he's sincere, and he actually has some knowledge of what he's doing, even if there are some subtle differences in what he does and was taught versus me. But....

 Let's first go where I largely agree...

I've said several times that I feel like Buddhism is sort of like advanced physics. Albert Einstein pioneered so much of advanced physics it might be considered appropriate to call it "Einsteinism." But if we did that we would not want to stop all of advanced physics at the point of Albert Einstein's death and say anything that came after is not legitimate.

Same with Buddhism. Buddha never claimed to be a prophet or messiah. So to say Buddhism stops with the death of the historical Buddha would be a grave misunderstanding of Buddhism. Westernization and modernization of Buddhism is inevitable and helpful....

 Yeah, Buddhism continues with the Buddhist practitioner, and the Buddha can be made into an idol even by iconoclastic Westerners in the same manner as Che Guevara or Bruce Lee.  This "nowness" of Buddhism is one of those things that was extremely attractive to me, and resolved some of the conundra of Christianity, viz. the issue of dead folks before "Jesus," people at "Jesus'" "time" in history, and us now...and yeah, it resolved those conundra by saying there was too much myth and thinking overlayed onto what might have been - or not - a reformer of Judaism.  

And then...

 I was going over the galleys of Nishijima Roshi's translation of Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. It's due out in about a month. In the translation, Nishijima Roshi insists upon translating the Sanskrit word shunyata as "the balanced state."

Everybody knows that the word shunyata means "emptiness." This is the accepted translation of shunyata and has been for many years. Nishijima himself is well aware of this. But he also felt that the word "emptiness" in English really did not convey what Nagarjuna was talking about when he used the word shunyata...

"Balanced state" is an improper translation of shunyata. No doubt about it. But it may convey more of the meaning of shunyata than the word "emptiness" is able to. That was Nishijima's feeling anyway.

The translation is idiosyncratic. It does not match other English translations. But there are several more standard versions easily available to anyone who wants them. There is no reason for yet another one of those.

People worry themselves far too much about the Westernization and modernization of Buddhism. It's nice to have faithful versions of ancient texts. But we also have to be aware that even the most faithful versions we can produce are not faithful. Even if we read the texts in their original languages, we come from such a different place culturally we still won't be able to get what the people who wrote them meant exactly. Even the people who read those texts during the authors' lifetimes may not have fully understood what their writers meant.

It's hopeless!

Brad, I know you must defend your master (oh, no, I quoted Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill Vol. I!) but really there's no excuse for an inaccurate  translation, and "balanced" simply does not convey shunyata, especially either to Westerners or Japanese.

His post goes on to quote Nishijima-roshi on these things, and I am pretty sure he gets the science all wrong here.  For example,  the autonomous nervous plays a large role in the "fight or flight" response, and it's actually the conditioning of both nervous systems that allows us to do stuff like swim, abstain from bodily functions when necessary, and so forth. It's not in any way a "balance" of these nervous systems so much as a training of them to be able to function in the world in a manner that's more effective for all beings.  And of course to say that "Nagarajuna appears to me to be saying here that until the autonomic nervous becomes balanced, it is impossible for the real universe to become clear," mixes anachronism into it.  I've read Nagarajuna, Brad, and you can't find a whiff of neurophysiology in his Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way.  You will find deep precursory thought to the existentialists and post-modernists, but not neurophysiology.

And yet despite all of the above, I still have a great admiration for Warner, and via him, his teacher Nishijima-roshi.  They've actually done the practice, jumped off the 100 ft. pole and all that stuff. It's not so much that I don't care that they're wrong; I care more for who they are, so that even when they're flat out wrong, I can still write the above with that level of respect.

But I tell you, there's more science in Wing Chun - namely mechanical physics, and yes, behavioral psychology - than there is in any of the above. Much more.  We don't need to overlay pseudo-scientific gobbledygook into Zen practice, especially when there's enough empirical evidence to show that, regardless of the "spirituality" involved or not, it's helpful.