给朋友的电邮，粘贴如下：
Thanks for the encouragement and the reminder... I knew I could tell you and get a positive response. Most people would, I imagine, be "scared" when topics of consciousness and life and death come up in a conversation. That's why I keep it to myself. The good thing is, because of my experience with Qigong, I can temper my meditation with daily Qigong practice, so it's more fun.

According to Bertrand Russell's reasoning, people like the Buddha are perpectually faced with an insurmountable dilemma when attempting to explain their experience in one state to an audience who are in another state, because to do the explanation, they have to necessarily come out of the first state and once they are out of that state, their experience ceases. It's very much like waking up to recount a dream - much is lost and much is distorted. You know what the Buddha did? He resorted to similes, anecdotes and repetitions, over and over again. Such similes, anecdotes and repetitions abound in Buddhist scriptures and if you are to read them, you will be bored to tears and driven crazy.

The gist, actually, is very straightforward - impermanence of all phenomena (and laws governing such phenomena), unsatisfactoriness (of being, of life, because of the aforementioned impermanence, as it's human nature to aspire towards perpetuality, which is an illusion or a conjured-up reality) and nonsubstantiality (which is in the same strain as impermanence, except that it's more personal - it's the nonsubstantiality of "self", including the individual self, "Atman" in Sankrit, and the universal self, "Brahma" in Sanskrit).

In Chinese, they are 无常，苦，无我.

Being literate in English and being exposed to related literature in a language other than Chinese is a blessing, isn't it?

In the original Buddhist philosophy, there's only one "ultimate" rule, namely, causality [因果法则 or, if you want to sound cool, 缘生法/缘起法]. That's all. It's atheism, through and through. But its later ramifications turned it into a religion. It started off as a philosophy (in theory) and an "order" (in practice). But human beings need faith more than they need truth. Buddhism, as a religion, came into being. The Pureland Sect (净土宗), for example, is very much a Chinese version of Christianity. As I have not come to any conclusion about Christianity, I can't say I have formed a definitive opinion of the Pureland Sect. But between the lines, you can suss out what I might be thinking: Release/nirvana comes when you truly understand impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and nonsubstantiality. You live like a normal person and may react to and interact with the world like anyone else, but there is a core in you that is no longer affected/shaken by external stimuli, so you have the ultimate peace in your inner world and that is pureland, bathed in infinite light. It never was, never is, and never will be outside our "mind". But Mahayana (大乘佛教) would immediately denounce my argument as attachment to causality (执于缘生法). That might be so, but one must not jump the gun... It's a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis (正题、反题、合题）as in Hegelian philosophy and I'll get there one day. Somehow, I sense that Chan Buddhism may be the gateway to the true essence of Buddhism and the real essence may lie in 唯识宗, aka 法相宗, founded by 玄奘 himself. You wonder why he bothered to set up his own sect, which soon lapsed into oblivion because no one could get it. However, my reservation is about the "ultimate reality" that 法相宗 talks about. The Buddha was reticent about the ultimate reality, for a good reason definitely. The ultimate reality runs the risk of becoming a de-personified god or divinity. The Buddha said - regarding ultimate "self", if all experiences are absent (i.e. there's no frame of reference), can you sense that self? No. If not, how do you know it exists? He posed it as a question. He did not answer it. Clever guy!

In a nutshell, the Buddha reached enlightenment by three means: (1) ESP (extrasensory perception, 神通), (2) reasoning and inferences based on ESP-derived experiences, and (3) predecessors' accounts of their experiences, for reference only. With ESP, he saw the causal links between phenomena, which proved the law of causality; through reasoning, the law of causality was elaborated upon; and by referring to sages' experiences, he was able to confirm, refute or modify them and improve his own system.

The importance of ESP to the Buddha's enlightenment may come as a surprise, because we often hear that Buddhism discourages pursuit of 神通. But the fact is that without ESP, there's no Buddha. But this is no average ESP, it's ESP of a higher order, attained at the end of 四禅定. At lower levels, ESP is tainted with human instincts, namely, death instinct and pleasure instinct (both the Buddha and Freud were agreed on this point), and illusions will cloud the seer. Interestingly, God was created because of these instincts.

That'll lead to another topic...

I must sign off here... I'm hungry. I'll finish off the watermelon first.