|
Truth
Without Function versus Function as Truth The
Diamond Sūtra and the Druid Finn’s Procedure
Monism By Bodhangkur 1. The Shared Premise: the
Failure of Ownership Both the Diamond Sūtra
and Finn’s Procedure Monism begin from the same diagnostic insight: possession
is illusion. The difference emerges in what follows that demolition.
The Diamond Sūtra halts at the void it
has cleared. Procedure Monism re-populates the void with function. 2. The Diamond Sūtra:
Truth Without Function The Diamond conducts a systematic cancellation of
all referents. Every term is turned inside out—“form
is not form; therefore it is called form”—until only
the procedure of negation itself remains. The text performs truth by
erasing error, but it never reinstates a working ontology. What is left is truth as absence: the cognition
that nothing whatever can be rightly called a thing. The practitioner arrives
at lucidity stripped of every motive. In that state, the question “what now?”
becomes meaningless. The Buddha’s “mind that abides nowhere” is a mind
without friction, but also without agenda. It is a brilliant epistemic maneuver
and an existential impasse. Having emptied the world of ownership, the Sūtra empties it of use. Truth is attained at
the cost of function. The knowing is pure; nothing remains to be done. 3. The Procedural Gap This is the gap the Druid Finn isolates: if
ownership is illusion and truth is content-free, what sustains operation? The text thus contradicts its own lived condition: it functions
while denying function. Its enlightenment is performed by metabolism.
The unacknowledged remainder is process itself—the very thing the text never
names as ultimate. 4. Procedure Monism: Function as Truth Finn’s Procedure Monism starts where the Diamond Sūtra stops. It accepts that no substance or
owner exists, but it treats procedure itself as the real. Reality is not a collection of entities but an ongoing
computation—a quantised serial execution of constraints acting on
turbulence. Every identifiable thing, from photon to mammal, is a bounded
iteration of that computation. Being and functioning coincide; to
exist is to process. Where the Diamond says “emptiness,” Procedure
Monism says “active rule-set.”
Where the Buddha finds cessation, Finn finds adaptation. The “Universal
Procedure” (UP) is blind, automatic, self-restarting. It never attains; it executes. 5. Re-defining Non-ownership Procedure Monism keeps the Diamond’s demolition
of ownership but interprets it functionally. The emergent’s
lack of possession does not imply vacuity; it implies open integration.
A cell owns nothing, yet it sustains coherence by metabolising. Likewise, a
human owns no life; it is the running of life’s program at that locus. Thus, loss of ownership is not extinction but
liberation into pure operation—the only mode by which the UP can continue
iterating through finite forms. The Diamond’s “non-abiding mind”
becomes, in Finn’s idiom, a non-blocked circuit: adaptive,
self-balancing, and indefinitely recyclable. 6. Truth Re-conceived as Performance In Procedure Monism, “truth” ceases to mean
correspondence between thought and object. Since objects are procedural
outputs, truth is measured by fidelity of performance. A photon is
“true” to the UP when it propagates at c; a cell when it replicates
accurately; a human when its cognition maintains equilibrium with
environment. Truth therefore equals functional success. The
satisfaction signal—the ancient Sanskrit ānanda—is
feedback of well-executed procedure, not mystical bliss. Enlightenment,
recast procedurally, is simply frictionless functioning. 7. Example: the Candle and the
Code In Diamond logic, the flame that burns without
clinging to wick or wax exemplifies impermanence. The wise perceive its
emptiness and do not attach. In procedural logic, the same candle is an energy-transfer
event perfectly enacting chemical constraint. Its truth lies in the
correctness of its burn, not in the recognition of its voidness. Awareness
that sees the process truly is itself another process—an algorithmic mirror,
not a detached witness. The Diamond reads disappearance; Procedure
Monism reads completion. 8. Example: the Human as
Adaptive Iteration The Diamond Sūtra’s arahant dissolves the self
into silence. For Finn, the human’s function is diagnostic participation in
the UP’s adaptive loops. Consciousness is not to be stilled but clarified
until feedback matches input—until perception, decision, and action form one
seamless operation. When that occurs, the human performs perfect
iteration of the UP—sat-cit
(being-consciousness) at baseline, ānanda
(reward) as transient feedback. Ownership is irrelevant; the system runs
itself. The gain is stability, not metaphysical deliverance. 9. Comparative Logic
10. Philosophical Resolution Where the
Diamond Sūtra attains a perfect truth
of seeing but leaves being in suspension, Procedure Monism achieves a truth
of doing that preserves seeing as one of its sub-functions. The first
stops at epistemic zero; the second restores ontology as algorithm. In Finn’s
formulation, there is no contradiction between non-ownership and existence:
the emergent is the procedure’s self-execution. Nothing is forfeited
because nothing ever belonged to anyone; yet everything persists because the
UP continues to operate. Life is not possessed once in eternity—it is
eternity, running locally. 11. Conclusion: From Vacant Clarity to Operative
Intelligence The Diamond
Sūtra: purity purchased by
paralysis. Truth becomes a mirror that reflects nothing because the seer and
the seen have both been erased. Procedure
Monism: coherence purchased by participation. Truth is the
fidelity of the mirror’s ongoing function—the accuracy with which process
reflects process. The
difference is not merely doctrinal but structural. The Diamond Sūtra perfects the diagnosis of delusion;
Procedure Monism supplies the metabolism that follows diagnosis. One
ends in immaculate stillness; the other in perpetual
renewal. The
druidic conclusion, therefore, is functional and Occam-simple: When
ownership ends, existence does not vanish; it performs itself. The Buddhist’s versus
the Druid’s TRUTH response Why the enlightened don’t reveal the TRUTH |