Compression

What kind of information can be held in a text? A western approach might be mathematical, defining exactly what data some sequence of symbols can hold. Compressing that information then means using some clever method or a machine to rewrite it into a form that takes up less room, and still holds all of the original information. The laws of mathematics put very strict limits on this type of compression, though. A text like this one could be compressed, but at most to about a third of its original size, and no more. These laws cannot be broken, so we humans have had to find compromises. Rather than perfectly convey every last bit of information, we make summaries. That means we determine what parts of the data are least important, and get rid of them. Humans do this constantly, and it’s what makes communication of any type possible. Any time we tell a person a story about our day, we are throwing out a huge amount of information. We couldn’t convey every detail of sensory, perceptual, emotional, and conscious feeling, so we don’t – we chop the experience down to a few key components, and share those as best we can. It’s easy to see how the same type of thinking influences not only the western, materialist view of text, but also our general experience of life as informationally finite and closed-off. Any text or recording is reduced to be representational and removed from its own intrinsic, experiential meaning. Mahāyāna Buddhism shatters this idea of text, experience, and experience-as-text in a dramatic and (to me) deeply exciting way.

The Prajñāpāramitā , or the Perfection of Wisdom, is a Mahāyāna sutra of more than 10,000 lines. In those brief 10,000 lines, it contains everything there is to know about the true nature of reality. I think that is already quite the feat, but it doesn’t stop there. The wisdom of that sutra is compressed into the few-hundred-line Diamond Sutra, and even further into a few dozen lines in the Heart Sutra. Finally, it is put into the “Prajñāpāramitā in One Letter”, the Sanskrit letter A! In the doctrine, these are not summaries, but perfect compressions. The concise Heart Sutra and even the single letter A entirely contain the knowledge of the Prajñāpāramitā. Learning about this concept in class, it immediately brought to mind Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Aleph”. To summarize (ha!), the narrator’s acquaintance claims to have found in his basement a point which contains the entire universe, which he is using as inspiration for a poem. The narrator thinks that couldn’t possibly be the case, but he decides to check anyways. In fact, the acquaintance is right, and the narrator finds a point that contains everything. He finds:

The limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere … In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I’ll try to recollect what I can.

The narrator briefly discusses the meaning of the name of the Aleph as the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, relating it to Jewish Kabbala, and ideas from Cantor’s Mengenlehre. He does not, however, make the connection that Aleph is the ancestor of the letter A, a.k.a. the Prajñāpāramitā in One Letter, the condensation of perfect and complete wisdom into a single syllable! Coincidence? Maybe, but there’s something to it… Ursula K. Le Guin makes a similar connection in her translation of the Tao Te Ching. In a footnote to the first chapter, she says: “A satisfactory translation of this chapter is, I believe, perfectly impossible. It contains the book. I think of it as the Aleph, in Borges’s story: if you see it rightly, it contains everything.”

There is something ineffable yet relatable in this idea about infinity and text. I feel that I have experienced this phenomena, reading my favorite texts or paying attention to something small. And, in fact, the phenomena is inextricably experiential. The infinite meaning in the Lotus Sutra, for example, is not just hidden in the characters of the text, it must actually be experienced, be done, to comprehend its meaning. This is a specific facet of a general idea in Buddhism. Truth and meaning are not taken on faith, as doctrine from a text, but on experience. And because these truths are so deep, they are everywhere and in everything! To experience them, all we have to do is look very closely at one thing, and in it we will see everything. It’s the interconnectedness of Indra’s Net, where within each point is everything, but not only as a representation – the connections themselves are the matter of which every point is made.

To end, an instructional poem by Yoko Ono:

TAPE PIECE III 1963 summer
Snow Piece

Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling.
This should be done in the evening.
Do not listen to the tape.
Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with.
Make a gift wrapper, if you wish, using the same process with a phonosheet.