User:Zenwhat/Zen guide

The following is a guide to editing Wikipedia from a Zen Buddhist perspective. This essay is unnecessarily long, though it is necessarily so, since people often seem to need to hear the words before they gain sudden insight. This essay can be briefly summarized as, "Do what needs to be done, without ego, and nothing else." It may also be summarized as, "Edit Wikipedia out of an enlightened self-interest." If you fully understand what this means, you do not need to read any further. If you are unsure, mindfully reading the following may be helpful.

The Four Noble Truths

Wikipedia is suffering.
The origin of this suffering is ego.
The cessation of ego is the path and the way to good editing.
The path and the way to good editing is the Noble Eightfold Path.

The First Noble Truth

"Wikipedia is suffering," does not mean that editing Wikipedia is inherently suffering. Nothing is inherent. On the contrary, editing Wikipedia is frequently an enjoyable activity. Why else would anyone do it? What this means is that, from time-to-time, we may find edits we disagree with, even blatant POV nonsense or vandalism, and our immediate attempts to remove it may prove difficult, if not impossible. When this happens, we feel suffering.

The Second Noble Truth

The origin of suffering is ego. One should not have attachment to articles. If they do, they simply suffer more or cause suffering for others. When a person is attached to an article, either they attempt to push their point-of-view or they feel an unhealthy obsession with removing points-of-view, which causes disruption.

The Third Noble Truth

Attachment leads to suffering and suffering leads to death. The cessation of attachment leads to greater freedom to edit Wikipedia and improve it as you see fit.

The Fourth Noble Truth

The Noble Eightfold Path

Wisdom (Sanskrit: prajñā, Pāli: paññā)

1. Right view (NPOV)

2. Right intention (Good faith)

Ethical conduct (Sanskrit: śīla, Pāli: sīla)

3. Right speech (Civility and Etiquette)

4. Right action (Adhering to Wikipedia policy)

5. Right livelihood (Making appropriate edits, in accordance with what Wikipedia is not)

Mental discipline (Sanskrit and Pāli: samādhi)

6. Right effort (Building Consensus)

7. Right mindfulness (Staying cool when the editing gets hot)

8. Right concentration (Check your facts and make sure they are reliable and verifiable)

The Ten Precepts

This is the core of Wikipedia Zen morality. Any good editor should make the following vows:

To refrain from removing information.
To refrain from violating copyright.
To refrain from engaging in harassment.
To refrain from having bad faith.
To refrain from mindlessness.
To refrain from reverting more than three times a day per article
To refrain from trolling
To refrain from using Wikipedia as a forum or a personal website
To refrain from assuming bad faith.
To refrain from accepting or paying bribes to make edits (including sharing accounts or sockpuppetry).

The Three Marks of Wikipedia

Suffering

The first noble truth. Editing Wikipedia is boring, tedious, futile, and annoying.

Impermanence

Any edit you make is temporary. Tomorrow or the day after, it may be wiped clean and you must accept it. There is no past and there is no future. If there were, where would it be?

When did you read the previous sentence? Now. When are you reading this sentence? Now. When will you read the next sentence? Now. The past is a mental abstraction within the present moment and the future is a mental abstraction within the present moment. It is not true that we move through time, time moves through us.

Non-self

Who are you? You do not need to accept this idea on faith. That would be stupid. But let's examine that question. Traditional Buddhist phenomenology (see Theravada) places all experience into five categories, called the Five aggregates:

"form" or "matter":
The physical world, your body, and your internal organs.
"sensation" or "feeling":
Sensation of pleasure and suffering.
"perception" or "cognition":
The ability to recognize an object (for instance, the sound of a bell or the shape of a tree).
"mental formations" or "volition":
All forms of mental habits, thoughts, ideas, opinions, compulsions, and decisions triggered by objects.
"consciousness":
A higher degree of mental formation we commonly refer to as consciousness, sentience, and self-awareness.

Now, Psychologists may certainly object to the above model. But even if it could be re-modeled differently, it's a reasonable enough set of assumptions, right? Let's examine each aspect of this model and see how it relates to you.

You are not your body. If I slice off your hand, I can separate it from you.
You are not your feeling. Morphine and Tylenol can make you numb.
You are not your perception. If I pluck out your eyes, you are blind. If I slice off your ears, you are deaf.
Mental formations. You are not your mental formations. If you take LSD, you will see many mental formations that are not real.
You are not your consciousness. If you sleep or take certain intoxicants, it is almost gone ("unconscious"). If I am a neurosurgeon and I cut your corpus collosum, your consciousness splits in two. Which one are you? The left side of your brain or the right? Let us say I can cut your frontal lobe into fourths. It's not certainly possible, but it's scientifically plausible. Which one are you? Now let us say I do it into eigths, sixteenths, 32ndths, onto infinity -- in the mind of every person is an infinite universe of full of people. Which one are you?

Consciousness is made up of a flurry of cognitions flying by so quickly we see them as a continuous sense of self rather than a chain of sensations. Who are you, without your body? Who are you, without your feeling? Who are you, without your perception? Who are you without your mental formations? And who are you, in between each moment of consciousness?

You are emptiness and within that emptiness is Buddha-nature. Let go of yourself and be free.

How is there Buddha-nature? Being arises from consciousness, consciousness arises from mental formations, perceptions, and feelings. Mental formations, perceptions, and feelings, arise from form. Form arises from emptiness, and emptiness arises from form. Recognizing this, all things are connected. Within you is pure, undifferentiated consciousness which perceives the world as it actually is, with boundless compassion for all beings.

Pick up a pen and paper. Press the pen to the paper, then remove it. See the dot? That's you. That's me. That's everything.

The Way

The Way that can be told is not the true Way. It must be felt and practiced right now.

What is the way? Wikipedia has no laws, yet there is a spontaneous order. People from all over the world have come together to form the various software and hardware components (including vast telecommunication networks called "the internet"), from diverse backgrounds, all coming together to form Wikipedia, with most of them not even realizing the results of their action. This is the Way.

Virtue

The virtues of the editors on Wikipedia determine the outcome. The method by which edits are made is arbitrary. The method is arbitrary, because the method itself is not fundamental or separate from the editors themselves; the method is founded upon the virtues of the editors, as they're the ones which write it. If editors are virtuous, the wiki process is always sound. If editors are not virtuous, any proposed method or process cannot possibly succeed. Wise editors are concerned with virtue, while foolish editors concern themselves with the arbitrary processes by which a decision is reached. Wise editors know that they cannot control anything beyond themselves, while foolish editors desperately cling to a particular outcome and try to control the entire wiki.

Four classes of editors

There are four types of editors:

Those who edit for their own selfish benefit: Vandals and contentious editors.
Those who edit for the sake of sharing the truth about particular topics they care about: most editors.
Those who edit for the sake of the entire encyclopedia, the rarest of editors.
Those who edit merely for the sake of editing, apart from goals and aspirations: Virtually no one.

Each of these is in order from least noble to most noble.

The Chief Virtues

(...to be filled in later)

Effortless Strength

One cannot seek to impose their will on others, but must work through the existing order. How does one act in accordance with the Way? Through non-resistance, by doing through not doing anything at all. Where there is resistance, there is ego. The fool scrambles to grab everything he can. The sage picks up one stick but grasps ten.

There is a legend of a queen who once walked outside of her palace and stubbed her toe on the ground. Immediately, she ordered her servants to cover the entire nation with leather. One of her servants asked, "Why not just put leather on your feet?" and thus, shoes were born.

Don't worry about everything it once. Let it go. Do one thing right at a time and then move on. If you do it right, they will say, "Look, we did it! We got the article featured!" and no one will remember you.

The Value of Silence

Four monks were meditating in a monastery. All of a sudden the prayer flag on the roof started flapping.

The younger monk came out of his meditation and said: "Flag is flapping."

A more experienced monk said: "Wind is flapping."

A third monk who had been there for more than 20 years said: "Mind is flapping."

The fourth monk who was the eldest said, visibly annoyed: "Mouths are flapping!"

Never say more than you need to. It is a sign of ego, a waste of time, and foolish. Need I say more? The nail that stands up is hammered down.

Two schools

All Zen Wikipedians see the enlightenment of all beings as inevitable, but a conditional inevitability that depends on continual contribution to Wikipedia. The question is a matter of when and how. There are two predominant schools of thought. Neither are contradictory, but simply see one approach as more effective than the other. Soto Zen does not advocate being disruptive and Rinzai Zen does not advocate bad edits.

Soto Zen - Wikipedia's main problem is ignorance. People should focus on attaining sudden insight right now and making perfect edits. (See Immediatism)
Rinzai Zen - Insight takes many years to develop and people should focus on diligently editing Wikipedia, the best they can. This may be foolish now, but it will lead to less disruption. (See Eventualism)

External links