Sartre v. Kant: Who's More Mahayana?

Over at Justin Whitaker's blog, there's a post on Kant with a detour of Viktor Frankl.  Justin writes:

... Perhaps the Buddha, Kant, Frankl and others will exhort ideals that seem beyond the reach of ordinary people. But it is exactly that ideal, and the striving we ordinary beings undertake to attain it, that allows us to become fully human. Think a bit about the “cross-winds” of society toward complacency, sensual enjoyment, blame, etc…

 I think several things about this:

1. Of course it's kind of pointless to try to crow-bar Western philosophical constructs into  Eastern philosophical constructs, just as it is to say that Kant and Nietzche were saying the same thing.  But...
2. That said, clearly the Buddha did not subscribe the Western concept of the ideal.  He had bigger fish to fry.
3. If I were to map Western philosophers as "near" to Buddhist philosophy, I'd start with existentialists such as Sartre.   Sartre's concept of the human is void of an essence.  That is closer, I submit, to the Mahayana ideal of the aggregates being fundamentally empty than the presumption of an ideal to which one strives.  Striving's important, but not because there's a "goal" there, but because that's what we do.

All of that said, I think frankly that Viktor Frankl's kind of a poor metaphor for Buddhism for other reasons.  You can get a glint of why I might think so from a couple of  Amazon reviews of "Man's Search for Meaning."  The first:

I am a widow, and this book was recommended to me by a psychologist to help lift my spirits. I'm sorry, but I'm not sure how page after page of descriptions of life under the nazis is supposed to help anyone with anything. I was already aware that many people have had to go through even worse things than watching a beloved spouse die of cancer, awful as that is. Certainly Mr. Frankel's experience and response to it is a tribute to the human spirit -- proof that we are more resillient than we think. But uplifting? No, I don't think so. Depressing, with no new information, is my synopsis. More power to those who can comfort themselves with some "meaning" in suffering and get something out of this book. But if you don't, you won't be the only one. 

And the second:

What's proven here? That if you can convince youself you have something to live for: you will continue to live for it. So? If after getting hit on the head with a lead pipe 100x one is to receive ten million dollars, I suppose there are some who will endure that pain, too, in the hope they will survive. They won't.
Perhaps the real question is if there is *any* reward for enduring the brutality of life that is worth the suffering. Most, if not virtually all, love relationships are based on a thinly or not-so thinly disguised basis of psychology mercantilism, if not outright economic dealmaking. Other higher pursuits: art, philosophy, philanthropy, so-called spiritual attainment are arguably better, but, really, are little more than panaceas not much different, in their ultimate purpose, than devoting one's life to developing the perfect tennis game, for instance. They absorb one's attention and distract one's focus from the pain & dissolution to come, or even occuring, & keep one, perhaps, from ending it all at the very moment. In this manner, we all buoy each other up, but for what? The question remains unanswered. Life is a concentration camp and we are all going to the gas chamber in the end. What do we do in the meantime. Is it worth it?
Frankl, like any reasonably intelligent person, delineates the central problem well: Why live? But like every other professional philosopher or psychologist, he comes up with a reason (altho in this case the reason boils down to *find a reason*) because, well, what else is he going to do? The biological imperative compels us to go on with life at any price. The alternative: that there is no reason to do so--that is simply too terrifying to contemplate, would violate species survival, and be considered unpublishable. Just once I'd like to see a thinker have the courage to face the ultimate question and not flinch, escape to a flight of fancy, take a leap of *faith* or otherwise dissemble.
Life is not worth living. Don't blink. 

 These are two very good counters to the "living for the ideal/meaning" part.  Frankl's position is kind of an escape- the escape of turning one's life into some kind of essence.

Frankl got through the camps with this view.  But Sartre also got through his ordeals without that view. 

Moreover, you'll never develop the perfect tennis game by pursuing some kind of ideal, because it means you won't be doing it in the moment.

It is true that the things one tell's one's self can help or hinder their journey through or around or above obstacles and suffering.  But one is no less human for despairing.  It just is more suffering though.

Some folks don't strive and they do die. That is the reality, and that reality should be the seeds of great compassion and empathy.  Maybe that reality triggers a Sartrian "will to action" that helps those with that will help all beings. 

But when death is inevitable, when imperfection is inevitable, when the "goal" crumbles into dust, there are times when we must keep going even though it is painful and difficult, with no great likelihood of success. If death is our lot itself, regardless of the outcome, we can attempt to make our mark.

Eido Shimano, Shugden, Dalai Lama, and Western Buddhist blogosphere...hopefully my final words for a while

 I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but it ties together some of the threads I'd been talking about on other posts and elsewhere in the Buddhist blogosphere. For very good posts on Eido Shimano, by the way, see the posts here and here. (And thanks to Barry Briggs for the kind words.)  Please also note that I mean nothing untoward in regards to other people and blogs mentioned below; rather I am only trying to make sure we all get it right. As a sign in one of the offices in another department in my company say, "It's not about being right, it's about getting it right."

I've thought more on the issues related to the above topics in the title of this post, and what exactly has been bugging me about the Buddhist blogosphere. Like everything like these things, there was a confluence of events I'm trying to tie together in my mind; to resolve some cognitive dissonances, as it were.   I did find it rather odd that the NY Times contacted Danny Fisher for their article on Eido Shimano.  While he's got a graduate degree in Buddhism and what-not, he wasn't exactly connected to the principals in any way that I know. But good for him; I wouldn't have commented  at all if I had been contacted, as I would not have felt it appropriate to do so; I myself am quite removed from the relevant events.  That Danny Fisher supports the Dalai Lama of course is well-known but even he, I would have hoped, would be a bit more circumspect in quoting severely right-wing News Corporation's Wall-Street Journal op-ed page. Then there's the blogginess of Barbara's Buddhism blog, which, unfortunately, doesn't go into enough depth for my taste sometimes, and too, has a pro-Dalai Lama, anti-China bias.   And Tricycle, for the longest time, has been a big cheerleader of the Dalai Lama as well, but has also been more circumspect as well. And of course the corporate media is famous for making the Dalai Lama branded as avuncular. 

And there's the obvious, easy to find  information on the internet that the Dalai Lama is not all he's cracked-up to be.

How to make sense of all of it.  I mean, how many ways can you say that much of the hero-worship of the Dalai Lama is the result of a marketing campaign, and that the actual history is darker than is portrayed? Why is the US Rinzai hierarchy (rightly, as they admit) criticized for being lax about Eido Shimano's issues but the Dalai Lama invariably gets a free pass, even when it's plain as day that this man is  not the champion of Truth, Justice and the American Way of the media campaign? And I wanted to know more about the Dorje Shugden issue as well.

Well I did a bit of internet surfing, etc. Here's what I've found/learned/concluded:

• Stephen Batchelor did a good job way back in '98 dissecting the whole Dorje Shugden controversy from the Buddhist religious point of view.  

• In that article was an oblique reference  to Ch'an in Tibet:

They see Dzogchen as a return to the Hindu ideas that Buddhists resisted in India, and a residue of the Ch’an (Zen) doctrine of Hva-shang Mahayana, proscribed at the time of the early kings. 

•  So, thanks to a quick trip around the internets, I can now figure out the situation behind this post from Barbara O'Brien in July:

China is not having this. "The Dalai Lama must have forgotten that the Tibetan Buddhism was strongly influenced by the Chinese Zen Buddhism throughout its entire process of development," says an anonymous writer at ChinaTibetOnline, a Chinese government website.  "The equal-sized statue of Sakyamuni housed in the Jokhang Temple was originally introduced by the famous Princess Wencheng in China's Tang Dynasty."

My understanding is that the Tibetans are the inheritors of Buddhist traditions from India and latter-day Gandhara that died -- sometimes violently -- by the 13th century. Nalanda itself was sacked and burned about 1200. Most of the early patriarchs of Tibetan Buddhism were Indian, not Chinese, and their teachings traveled directly to Tibet without going through China...

I'm pretty sure it's a gross overstatement to say that Chinese Zen (Chan) influenced Tibetan Buddhism through "its entire process of development." There's supposed to be some connection between Zen and the Nyingma Tibetan school, but I'm not sure what that connection is, or how deep it goes.

First of all, if you read Batchelor's article itself you can begin to understand the similarity to Ch'an if not the influence, in Nyigma teaching:  

The Nyingma teaching of Dzogchen regards awareness (Tib., rig pa) as the innate self-cognizant foundation of both samsara and nirvana. Rig pa is the intrinsic, uncontrived nature of mind, which a Dzogchen master is capable of directly pointing out to his students. For the Nyingmapa, Dzogchen represents the very apogee of what the Buddha taught, whereas Tsongkhapa’s view of emptiness as just a negation of inherent existence, implying no transcendent reality, verges on nihilism.

Now my understanding of this issue is that emptiness is itself empty, and the term "inherent existence" is sort of an oxymoron, as existence (based on my reading of existentialism, I admit, so it might fuzz things up a bit here) is the reference to the condition or act of being, where as to have something inhere to it is for that something to be part of its essence.  And having no essence (which is my take on emptiness, and from my readings of Suzuki and others seems to be common) means that voidness has no essence of voidness either,  which puts a stopping plug into the issue of the charges of contradictions nihilism (both for Buddhism and existentialism, since that means that the old saw about "how can you know you know nothing" and similar logical games is defeated by saying that we don't even say that you can't know anything).

But, as usual, I'm afraid I've digressed. Point is, the functions of Mind in the Nyingma teaching have analogs in Ch'an/Zen, these finer philosophical points aside (which, to my way of thinking, are on a set of measure zero - in other words, negligible -  in terms of efficacy compared to what one needs to do on a day to day basis anyway).

Now back to Batchelor's article and Ch'an in Tibet: Google Hva-shang and this is the first link. 

During this period of Tibetan history [ in the 8th century], Buddhism, which had come to Tibet a century earlier, was degenerating. Tibet had become fertile ground for differing schools of thought. Because of this, King Trisong Detsen arranged a debate in Samye to decide which of these tenets should take root in Tibet. The King invited Kamalashila to represent the Indian Buddhist school while Hva Shang Mahayana represented the Chinese Ch'an school. It is said that when Kamalashila and Hva Shang Mahayana first met in Samye, Kamalashila twirled his rosary around his finger inferring the question, "What is the source of the circling in samsara?" and when Hva Shang saw that, he covered his head, indicating that "ignorance is the source of suffering." Kamalashila then felt that Hva Shang Mahayana was someone who understood.

The debate in Samye became known as the Great Debate at Samye. The rules directed that the winning side would be sanctioned by the King while the losing side would have to leave the country. Kamalashila and the Indian Buddhist School won the debate and the Ch'an Buddhists were no longer allowed to spread their teachings in Tibet. However, although Hva Shang had to leave Tibet, even up to today, in order to remember his good qualities, Tibetan monks wear a blue cord attached to their upper garment.

Also, after Hva Shang lost the debate he left immediately leaving one of his shoes behind. Tibetans believe that this was a sign that aspects of his tenets would remain in Tibet.

I mean, folks, that was the first link from Google. Here's the second link, from Wikipedia:

The teachings of Moheyan and other Chan masters were unified with the Kham Dzogchen lineages {this may or may not be congruent with the Kahma (Tibetan: bka' ma) lineages} through the Kunkhyen (Tibetan for "omniscient"), Rongzom Chokyi Zangpo.^[13]

• Tricycle again mentioned the Dorje Shugden issue in 2008  here on its blog. One of the commenters there said something that is one of my main points here (I added the hyperlink.)

There is enormous bias in the Buddhist community towards the Dalai Lama such that it becomes an obstacle to objectively investigating his actions in India. I agree that these blogs are filled with positive (and political) stories about the Dalai Lama but no one wants to investigate the shadow side of the Dalai Lama’s leadership. I can understand this. No small child wants to find out that Santa Claus doesn’t exist - it’s a massive disappointment, a blow to the magical world they believed existed in their imagination But it’s time to grow up now. It’s time to objectively examine the Dalai Lama’s actions of ostracism and oppression in his own community and report the truth for the good of Buddhism, even if it’s disappointing to discover that the champion of tolerance and religious freedom is a political and religious dictator who is harming the lineage of his own Root Guru. The France 24 investigation revealed this clearly but it’s not enough - someone in the Buddhist community needs to blow the whistle on these activities that are destroying Buddhism. Tricycle needs to be honest here and investigate. You might think that this is an ‘arcane sectarian’ dispute but you aren’t seeing dependent relationship and what this is going to lead to in the future. It’s no good burying your head in the sand until Tsongkhapa’s tradition has been destroyed. Simply have the courage to report what you see.

• And that all brings me to my main point: Given the recent issue of scandal in my lineage (which those in a position to do so in our lineage have acknowledged, and which I have written about), it is obviously not simply sauce for the goose but simply good practice to examine our biases all over the place.  Too often much of what is written about in the Buddhist blogosphere, especially the media friendly "popular" blogs - ones written by bloggers that the corporate media go to for "Buddhist blogger" quotes is, to put it baldly, shallow and   sometimes  factually  incorrect.  And less often, corrected.
• In addition,  too often these bloggers have biases, especially when it comes to the Dalai Lama.  Somebody might accuse me of having pro-Chinese biases (heck, some have, OK?), and yeah, full disclosure: my wife and her family and their families are all Chinese.   But having written that, I've also seen a China that is rarely portrayed in any media, and generally it's tolerant of religion as long as it's not used to subvert the power of the state, which is pretty much what most folks in America would want with the exception of a few extremist Christians.  And people that don't acknowledge that when it comes to these issues are themselves guilty of a prejudice against China.  I don't like many things that government does and I don't parrot their lines, but I also try not to quote from right wing flacks; they too have their agenda, it's naive to the point of neglectful to not be aware of it.
• And, while I'm on the subject, there is a  5 word phrase missing in all of the Dalai Lama's wonderful declarations of human rights and democracy and such: separation of religion and state.  The Dalai Lama could fix that right now, and he hasn't.   If we have learned one thing it is that religious ideology is poisonous to the governance of a state when a religious hierarchy is the state.  Ah, well maybe that needs to be better taught.
• And the issue of separation of religion and state  is important for the same reason that the ZSS board tripped up with Eido Shimano: conflict of interest.  For a variety of reasons, in several formats, in my professional life I have had to deal with what they call "anti-trust" training. OK, I bet Danny Fisher never had to do that, so maybe it's this post is just my whole déformation professionnelle! Central to all the avoidance of anti-trust legal actions is the avoidance of even the appearance of a conflict of interest.  (You do not ever want to go be a target of an anti-trust investigation.  Ever.)  There was a conflict of interest in the fact that the Board of the ZSS was spiritually dependent on,  the guy they were supposed to be overseeing  (as well as having him and his wife on the board itself).  To put it simply, the members of the board needed to get something (i.e., spiritual guidance) from the person they were supposed to be independently overseeing.  For that reason truly independent oversight could not be achieved. Likewise, the Roman Catholic Church has the same issue with the Pope, and look at all the Peace Love and Understanding the assertion of the political and religious supremacy of the Papacy has brought all these years.  And therefore ditto with the Dalai Lama: an imaginary government of Tibet or the one in exile, for that matter cannot maintain the appearance of maintenance of execution of law without fear or favor as well as justice, if  the head of state can be believed to hold the spiritual fate of the government in his hands. It's a conflict of interest, and it's inherently unethical because it can lead to exactly the kinds of abuses we have seen from the history of Tibet.  In any American corporation if there were analogous conditions there would be a poop-storm of litigation following wrongful acts from this arrangement. (Yes,  it's also conflicts for the royalty in the UK and Sweden and Japan.  But nobody takes their religions as seriously, to be frank about it, and this is a Buddhist blog, you know. Oh, and Iran. Iran.)
• I would encourage anyone to do their own background on anything.  Don't believe anything I write; ask your own questions.

Let's talk about death! And Father's Day!

This week I attended the memorial service for someone in my company (I'll call him "J") who had died after a long illness; he had toughed it out for severl years, but finally, he went rather quickly.

Yesterday, my son - who espouses strong atheism, albeit at the age of  8 - asked me what happens to the mind after death.  My first answer was it really does not matter; nobody really knows, but we should live our lives as if every day were our last.  As I was speaking to him, my son -wisely for his age- pointed out that to be born meant one will indeed die, but still he had the question what happened to the mind?  I was reminded of some words written a while back by Jean Paul Sartre...

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment. The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible
existence that is known as the lot of man. Exile, captivity, and especially death (which we usually shrink from facing at all in happier times) became for us the habitual objects of our concern. We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even constant and exterior dangers, but that they must be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound source of our reality as men. At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: “Man is mortal!” And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death, because it could always have been expressed in these terms: “Rather death than…”

And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered NO. But the very cruelty of the enemy drove us to the extremities of this condition by forcing us to ask ourselves questions that one never considers in time of peace. All those among us – and what Frenchman was not at one time or another in this situation who knew any details concerning the Resistance asked themselves anxiously, “If they torture me, shall I be able to keep silent?” Thus the basic question of liberty itself was posed, and we were brought to the verge of the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself. For the secret of a man is not his Oedipus complex or his inferiority complex: it is the limit of his
own liberty, his capacity for resisting torture and death.

To those who were engaged in underground activities, the conditions of their struggle afforded a new kind of experience. They did not fight openly like soldiers. In all circumstances they were alone. They were hunted down in solitude, arrested in solitude. It was completely forlorn and unbefriended that they held out against torture, alone and naked in the presence of torturers, clean-shaven, well-fed, and well-clothed, who laughed at their cringing flesh, and to whom an untroubled conscience and a boundless sense of social strength gave every appearance of being in the right. Alone. Without a friendly hand or a word of encouragement. Yet, in the depth of their solitude, it was the others that they were protecting, all the others, all their comrades in the Resistance. Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty?

I don't think I quite answered his question, despite these a few of these  beautiful words appearing in my head.  (I quoted more than is relevant here, simply because it's generally hard to find the extension of this famous quote of his elsewhere.) 

Of course death is like this torturer, and also to a certain extent Sartre, like many of his comrades experienced a certain psychological effect as a result of these experiences.  

Mumon in his commentary on Joshu's Mu ( 無) relates that on penetrating 無 one will be "free in his way of birth and death" according to the translation by Paul Reps.

Hakuin, in writing to a Nichiren nun spoke of his relatively shallow first experiences of what he thought was his  awakening:

In a loud voice I called: "Wonderful, wonderful. There is no cycle of birth and death through which one must pass. There is no enlightenment one must seek. The seventeen hundred koans handed down from the past have not the slightest value whatsoever." My pride soared up like a majestic mountain, my arrogance surged forward like the tide. Smugly I thought to myself: "In the past two or three hundred years no one could have accomplished such a marvelous breakthrough as this."

Shouldering my glorious enlightenment, I set out at once for Shinano. Calling on Master Shoju, I told of my experience and presented him with a verse. The Master, holding my verse up in his left hand, said to me: "This verse is what you have learned from study. Now show me what your intuition has to say," and he held out his right hand.

I replied: "If there were something intuitive that I could show you, I'd vomit it out," and I made a gagging sound.

The Master said: "How do you understand Chao-chou's Mu?"

I replied: "What sort of place does Mu have that one can attach arms and legs to it?"

The Master twisted my nose with his fingers and said: "Here's someplace to attach arms and legs." I was nonplussed and the Master gave a hearty laugh. "You poor hole-dwelling devil!" he cried. I paid him no attention and he continued: "Do you think somehow that you have sufficient understanding?"

I answered: "What do you think is missing?"

Then the Master began to discuss the koan that tells of Nan-ch'uan's death. I clapped my hands over my ears and started out of the room. The Master called after me, "Hey, monk!" and when I turned to him he added: "You poor hole-dwelling devil!" From then on, almost every time he saw me, the Master called me a "poor hole-dwelling devil."

One evening the Master lay cooling himself on the veranda. Again I brought him a verse I had written. "Delusions and fancies," the Master said. I shouted his words back at him in a loud voice, whereupon the Master seized me and rained twenty or thrity blows with his fists on me, and then pushed me off the veranda.

This was on the fourth day of the fifth month after a long spell of rain. I lay stretched out in the mud as though dead, scarcely breathing and almost unconscious. I could not move; meanwhile the Master sat on the veranda roaring with laughter. After a short while I regained consciousness, got up, and bowed to the Master. My body was bathed in perspiration. The Master called out to me in a loud voice: "You poor hole-dwelling devil!"

After I devoted myself to an intense study of the koan on the death of Nan-ch'uan, not pausing to sleep or eat. One day I had an awakening and went to the Master's room to test my understanding, but he would not approve it. All he did was call me a "poor hole-dwelling devil."

Later on in that same writing, if my memory and the website I've quoted are correct, Hakuin says about the death of Nan-ch'uan:

If you wish to test the validity of your own powers, you must first study the koan on the death of Nan-ch'uan.

A long time ago San-sheng had the head monk Hsiu go to the Zen Master Tsen of Ch'ang-sha and ask him: "What happened to Nan-ch'uan after he passes away?"

Ch'ang-sha replied: "When Shih-t'ou became a novice monk he was seen by the Sixth Patriarch."

Hsiu replied: "I didn't ask you about when Shih-t'ou became a novice monk; I asked you what happened to Nan-ch'uan after he passed away."

Ch'ang-sha replied: "If I were you I would let Nan-ch'uan worry about it himself."

Hsiu replied: "Even though you had a thousand-foot winter pine, there is no bamboo shoot to rise above its branches."

Ch'ang had nothing to say. Hsiu returned and told the story of his conversation to San-sheng. San-sheng unconsciously stuck out his tongue [in surprise] and said: "He has surpassed Lin-chi by seven paces."

If you are able to understand and make clear these words, then I will acknowledge that you have a certain degree of responsiveness to the teachings. Why is this so? If you speak to yourself while no one is around, you behave as meanly as a rat. What can anyone possibly prove [about your understanding]?

I remember at the age of nine how shocked I was at my grandmother's death; and the way in which my parents had handled it didn't exactly soften the blow for me, although they (obviously in retrospect) had bigger fish to fry mentally at the time.

My father died in 2001; he did get a chance to see my son before he died; today is Father's Day. 

I feel very much at peace with all that; and in the service for the man from my company who died, I was amazed at how the narrative still revolves around, "Death's no problem for us because of Jesus."  I was sad because so many many many alternate possibilities for peaceful, harmonious reconciliation with the notion of death were excluded, as was, in my view, an inability even to conceive of such alternates.

One alternate might be seen in the myriad of possibilities of the answers to questions from my son.   Perhaps my answer - a bit from Sartre, a bit from Suzuki Shosan -  was also in the direction of the koan on the death of Nan-ch'uan. (Perhaps not.)

In something Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote he pointed out the issues arising from consciousness  - I think that was the area of intent of my son's question.  If a computer were sentient, could we know it? (Probably not - we can't even tell if anybody else besides us is sentient. Yes we take that "on faith" and yes, the subjective and objective spheres retain their character of subjectivity and objectivity despite their interdependent origination. )  So even if a smarty pants computer comes along, it wouldn't matter to us.

I did tell my son, "nobody really knows" what happens after you die, but I also did mention  that the idea that consciousness or awareness is irretrievably lost in death does not seem to be the case either.  It is manifestly obvious to me that the effects of those I have known and have died still hurtle forward in this world; where do these effects end and "their" consciousness begin?  Yeah, OK, if we're talking only about the meat computer between the ears, and its electrochemical phenomena,  it does the way of all meat.  But I don't think awareness actually is subsumed by that totality; it simply does not appear to be the case when I think about that spinning wheel.

I remember my father.  I remember J. Neither of them talked much about death, especially in the last months of their lives, and to the extent that such issues did come up, it was realistically expressed, at least in my father's case.  

I'd like to say I miss my father, but I feel  he's still here, regardless of whatever  happened to his consciousness.  I'm sure he's dealing with it fine.