POSTHUMOUS PIECES by Wei Wu Wei

POSTHUMOUS PIECES by Wei Wu Wei

This, his penultimate work, was published while Wei Wu Wei was still alive. Why call the book posthumous? Because the pieces in it are "tombstones, a record of living intuitions, which, embalmed in relative terminology are well and truly dead."

Thus, he decries the impossibility of writing a book of "living intuitions" with the power to reduce suffering. Starting with time and cause-and-effect, Wei Wu Wei challenges us to examine our most fundamental concepts of reality, which may, with any luck, become our own posthumous pieces. The essays and epigrams of this book are startling and profound. Wei Wu Wei is a master of the esoteric.

This new edition of the book originally published in 1968 has a Foreword by Wayne Liquorman, who writes "WWW demonstrates that deft touch which is so essential when dealing with the absurdity of trying to express the inexpressible."

Republished by Sentient Publications LLC 2004
Softcover 276 pages
ISBN 9781591810155

Excerpt from Part II of Posthumous Pieces

30. "Suffering" in Buddhism

When the Buddha found that he was Awake during that night under the bodhi-tree it may be assumed that he observed that what hitherto he had regarded as happiness, as compared with suffering, was such no longer. His only standard henceforward was ananda or what we try to think of as bliss. Suffering he saw as the negative form of happiness, happiness as the positive form of suffering, respectively the negative and positive aspects of experience. But relative to the noumenal state which now alone he knew, both could be described by some word in Maghadi, the language he spoke, which was subsequently translated as dukkha. Dukkha is the counterpart of sukha which implied “ease and well-being,” and whatever the Maghadi word may have meant it remains evident that to the Buddha nothing phenomenal could appear to be sukha although in phenomenality it night so appear in contrast to dukkha.

This proposition is quite general and can be more readily perceived in the case of - say - humility. Humility is the negative form of pride, and pride the positive form of humility: they are not different as what they are but only in their interpretation. What we mean by true or perfect humility is not that at all: it is the absense of ego-entity to experience either pride or humility because, if humility is experienced, it rebecomes a form of its opposite - pride.

Similarly what we interpret as suffering and its opposite are just negative and positive experience, but when there is no longer a supposed ego-entity to experience either, neither can be present any longer, and what remains is sat-chit-ananda the division of which into three elements is merely a dualistic convenience. To require an accurate translation into Pali or Sanscrit of words in a lost language, long centuries before the dialectics of Nagarjuna, Arya Deva, and Candrakirti, is unreasonable, particularly in a tradition rooted in the Positive Way which is natural to Indians: it is the inevitable burden of the Buddha’s teaching which concerns us rather than the dubious terms in which it may have been put into writing several centuries after his parinirvana.

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