25 1/2 THINGS A ZEN MASTER MIGHT MEAN WHEN UTTERING THE WORD "MU" UPON BEING ASKED BY A DISCIPLE WHETHER A DOG HAS BUDDHA NATURE, SOME OF WHICH ARE LIKELY TO ELICIT ENLIGHTENMENT FROM THE QUESTIONER, SOME OF WHICH AREN'T ©
by keroppi
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1. Mu: "12th letter of the Greek alphabet." (Unlikely to elicit enlightenment)
2. Mu: "Your question is unanswerable because it rests on incorrect assumptions." (Likely to elicit enlightenment)
3. MU: "Acronym of some institution of higher learning - e.g. University of Missouri, Media University, etc." (Unlikely)
4. Mu: "Affluent of the Irrawady, located in the district of Minbu, Birmania, and highly important for the local system of irrigation." (Unlikely)
5. Mu: "Concentrate your whole energy into this very answer, do not allow any disruptions to sway you, and your attainment will be like a burning candle illuminating the whole universe." (Likely)
6. Mu: "A constant of proportionality. Specifically, The ratio between the intensity of a magnetic field inside a given substance and the intensity of that same field as if it were in the void. Also called 'magnetic permeability'." (Unlikely)
7. Mu: "A kind of caramel. Specifically, a soft smooth chewy candy made of sugar, milk, butter and flavouring. Also called 'fudge'." (Unlikely, though its likelihood considerably increases if the questioner successfully works out the meaning and freely associates the word 'fudge' with 'humbug')
8. Mu: "Along with Atlantis and Lemuria, legendary lost continent believed by cranky archaeologists to have existed before the Great Flood." (Unlikely)
9. Mu: "Small fraction of the town of Edolo, province of Brescia, Italy, counting approximately 1,000 inhabitants. On the left side of Mu's parish presbytery there are the remains of the 'Presentation of Mary at the Temple' by Gerolamo Romano, XVI sec." (Unlikely)
10. Mu: "Elementary particle discovered by Anderson in 1936, also called meson mu or muon. Since it lacks any apparent function in the formation of the atomic structure, it has no utility in the explanation of the validity of the conservative laws of energy, and it seems to play no role in the network of subatomic interaction, the physicist Isaac Rabi, upon first hearing of its existence, is said to have exclaimed: 'Who ordered that?'." (Somewhat unlikely)
11. Moo: "Cow's lament." (Somewhat likely)
12. Mu: "The answer to your question depends entirely on how you chose to define the world, in particular the concepts 'dog', 'buddha', 'has' and 'nature'." (Likely)
13. MU: "Unprovable theorem of Hofstadter's MIU deductive system, discussed in Godel, Escher and Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid." (Very unlikely)
14. Mu: "Micron unit of measurement equal to 1,000 nanometers, where a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. The order of magnitude is 10-6 with respect to the unit. A human hair is about 100 microns thick." (Unlikely)
15. Mu: "Chinese unit of measurement equal to approx. 675 square meters or officially, to 781 square miles. It is subdivided in 4 chiio, 10 fen, where a fen corresponds to 10 li and 100 hao. 100 mu form one ch'ing." (Unlikely, though presumably slightly more likely than the previous one because of its Far-Eastern flavour)
16. Mu: "There are inescapable logical inadequacies in your language. In particular, your are posing a recursively undecidable question that falls into the class of self-referential problems." (Although seemingly likely at first glance, decidedly unlikely on second thought)
17. [dot].mu: "World Wide Web domain belonging to the country of Mauritius, off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean." (Unlikely)
18. Mu: "First character in the Korean word 'mudang', meaning 'witch-doctor'." (Not so unlikely)
19. Mu: "Frequently occurring term in the newsgroup soc.culture.vietnamese." (Unlikely)
20. Mu: "I don't know." (Likely)
21. Mu: "What a silly question. I should give you thirty whacks!" (Likely)
22. MU*: "Client for all MUD type games, including MUSH, MOO, MUCK and MUSE." (Unlikely)
23. Mu: "As glossed by the great koan commentator Mumon in his book Mu Mun Kan - whose title by an extraordinary coincidence alliterate both with the name of the author and with the sound of the very answer under scrutiny - your question is the expression of Truth itself. If you say, 'Yes', or if you say, 'No', you lose your Buddha nature. Do not believe that this is the common negative symbol meaning 'nothing': it is not nothingness, the opposite of existence." (Very likely)
24. Mu: "Nothing." (Most likely)
24 1/2 . Mu: "Nay." (Same as above)
25. All of the aforementioned (Enlightenment certain)
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This piece has been referenced by professor S. Edelman from Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) in his lectures on cognitive psychology. Among other things, Edelman is the author of Representation and Cognition in Vision" (MIT press, 1999).
Copyright© 2000 by keroppi <rosacrux@mail.com>
