Image via WikipediaCrazy Wisdom is a new film about the life of Chogyam Trunga. I like this piece from Tricycle because of the metaphor – “he embodied a quality of fearlessness that was like licking honey off a razor blade.”
Getting the best out of a precarious and harmful situation – what a great image for it. My question now is, can this be taught? What would the Rinpoches say about teaching this? Is it an effect of Enlightenment, or a cause? Perhaps neither – perhaps it’s a rhetorical dimension necessary to recognize one as Enlightened.
Buddhists don’t like to talk about rhetoric, per se, they do like to talk about “right speech,” one of the precepts given by the Buddha. Right speech can and should include rhetoric. I’m certain it happens in Buddhist pedagogy, and has always happened. I think it’s a lot more overt than we might suspect. I think there’s some fertile ground for research here.
For practice, how does one teach the debate student to perform argumentation this way? How do you lick the honey from the razor’s edge? Sounds like a question of style to me. And a question of many hours of difficult practice.
