Being

In your moment of being drawn by allure, siphoned beyond your own will

Scripture

The demon-flower is blooming; a sweet rankness is exhaling.

Color hooks the eye, reins the gaze; honey locks the root of the tongue.

Being is siphoning, is drawing; being is sticking, is welding.

Not I moving toward the honey—the honey hooking the soul.

Being is tempted, is hooked; swallowing the hook, forgetting itself.

When the temptation ends the pool runs dry; the sprout stabs the vault of blue.

Wenzi · On Being

You smell a fragrance. Sweet—but sweet with a fishy rankness, like a fruit ripened to the point of rot. It drifts from some corner of consciousness, and the instant you notice it, it has hooked your gaze and locked the root of your tongue (color hooks the eye, reins the gaze; honey locks the root of the tongue). You know full well it may be the poisonous honey spat out by a “demon-flower” (the demon-flower is blooming; a sweet rankness is exhaling), yet your feet move toward it against your will. You feel yourself pulled by a siphon-like force (being is siphoning, is drawing); your body turns sticky, as if about to be welded onto that tempting target (being is sticking, is welding).

“Not I moving toward the honey—the honey hooking the soul.” The scripture coldly breaks open the truth: it is not you moving toward the honey on your own (not I moving toward the honey). It is the honey itself that has the power to hook the soul (the honey hooking the soul). You have become the passive prey; the temptation is the active hunter.

Do not condemn yourself at once, and do not fight the temptation.

That will only stick you tighter to it.

Try a seemingly more dangerous move:

Stop your steps, but do not shift your gaze.

On the contrary—look at that “demon-flower” more intently; smell that “sweet rankness” more deeply.

While gazing, synchronously observe inside your body: which emptiness, which longing, has this sweet-rank air precisely hooked and soothed? Like a scientist observing a beautiful poison while recording his own reactions.

“Being is tempted, is hooked; swallowing the hook, forgetting itself.” You are in the state of “being tempted” and “being hooked” (being is tempted, is hooked). But when you devote yourself wholly to “studying,” a subtle change happens: for a while, you “forget” that you are the fish about to “swallow the hook” (swallowing the hook, forgetting itself). A thread of observational distance appears between you and the temptation.

In this thread of distance, you see clearly. You see the hollow behind the sweetness, the quick decay beneath the splendor. You see that this temptation was born precisely to fill some inner “hollow” of yours. Gazing at the temptation, you are in fact gazing at that “emptiness” in your own heart. “When the temptation ends the pool runs dry; the sprout stabs the vault of blue.” When the bewilderment is seen to its extreme, understood to its extreme (the temptation ends), that pool of desire breeding the temptation seems to dry up in an instant (the pool runs dry). And at the dry bottom of the pool, you see one point of hard, fresh green—not temptation, but the unyielding life-force of your own life—stabbing, in a sharp posture, toward the vast free sky (the sprout stabs the vault of blue).

The fragrance is still there, but it can no longer hook you. You turn and leave, light of step. The temptation never harmed you; it was only a mirror, letting you see the pit inside your heart, and the life-sprout at the bottom of the pit, always present, pointing at the light. You are not a bewildered lamb—you are that sharp, plain greenness itself, piercing through every sweet illusion, pointing at the true vault of heaven.

Being-Temptation: you are not the lost one—you are the awakened one who, through the mirror of temptation, has at last seen clearly his own longing and life-force.