“Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.” - Bruce Lee
For the interested, the original Dōgen zen koan goes something like this —
Before I began to practice, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. After I began to practice, mountains were no longer mountains and rivers were no longer rivers. Now, I have practiced for some time, and mountains are again mountains, and rivers are again rivers.
I believe this is also tied to La Subida del Monte Carmelo from San Juan de la Cruz. I'm oversimplifying, but basically it goes like this:
As San Juan climbs Monte Carmelo, he finds nothing at the base of the monte, then he finds nothing at the middle, but then, at the cusp, he finds Nothing (capital N Nothing).
There's quite a bit of parallels between proper "Catholic Mystics" and Zen teachers...
I highly recommend both the San Juan de la Cruz works, in particular Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night, along with The Cloud of Unknowing, which was an inspiration for him.
The book contains a collection of Koans along with Mumon's (et al) Commentary, Mumon's Verse, as well as modern day notes that help us understand some of the concepts hidden behind what looks like "poetical nonsense" at first, as well as giving the context for historical and mythological figures that are mostly unknown for those "outside the loop." What I love about the notes is that they still leave you with the opportunity to explore the koan further, properly, so they don't really take away all the fun.
Wakuan said, "Why has the Western Barbarian no beard?"
Mumon's Comment:
Study should be real study, enlightenment should be real enlightenment. You should meet this barbarian directly to be really intimate with him. But saying you are really intimate with him already divides you into two.
Mumon's Verse:
Don't discuss your dream
before a fool.
Barbarian with no beard
Obscures clarity.
NOTES (abridged)
- The Western Barbarian: The Western Barbarian stands for Bodhidharma, who brought Zen to China from India. He is always depicted with a beard. The case therefore means, "Why doesn't Bodhidharma, who has a beard, have no beard?"
- Meet this barbarian directly: This is not really a meeting but a becoming. You should yourself become Bodhidharma. Then if you have a beard, Bodhidharma has a beard; if you have no beard, then neither had Bodhidharma. But can you say that you are in truth Bodhidharma?
[...]
- Obscures clarity: Words, concepts, and other inventions of the mind only obscure the truth. Do not cling to shadows, but catch hold of truth itself.
The bell curve meme is a static taxonomy of people, and if the link you posted is correct, its origins were explicitly political. The version described by Bruce Lee, and anybody who has achieved a high level of skill, is about the process of learning and mastery.
In the bell curve version, the wisdom of grug brain and the wisdom of the monk are presented as equal, and the struggle of the midwit is framed as a pretentious, unnecessary aberration. The lesson it teaches is, don't seek out knowledge and new ideas. Education confuses the "midwit" people who are smart enough to partially grasp it but not smart enough to see through it like the monk.
In contrast, the "a punch is just a punch" version frames the conceptual struggle as a necessary phase in a process that leads to mastery. The beginner cannot engage directly with the simplicity of the master, so the beginner must engage through concepts and through practice. The more they do so, the more simple things begin to feel.
Since this started with a Bruce Lee quote, we can use him to see that it is not just a linear process that passes through conceptual education and ends in mastery. That leads to a dead end, because mastery can only be complete in a limited context. Bruce Lee kept searching outside his zone of mastery to find ways to get better. He studied techniques from other martial arts and fighting sports, even though in doing so he had to engage at a conceptual level since he had not mastered those arts.
For example, his art included trips and throws, and he was a master of his art. Yet when he got the chance later, he practiced judo with expert judoka. To do so, he had to back off from "a trip is just a trip, a throw is just a throw" and learn the techniques of judo. I don't think anybody has ever suggested he was a master at judo, which suggests he had to be engaging with it on a conceptual level. Yet he believed that his practice with judo improved the skills he had already achieved mastery at.
Not only did Bruce Lee preach constant assimilation of new ideas, he also preached simplification by discarding what is not useful. If a punch is just a punch, what do you discard? The whole punch? In order to find something to discard, you must look past the apparent simplicity of the internalized skill and dissect it conceptually.
In this view of things, conceptual thinking is not just a phase you go through on the way to mastery, but rather a complementary way of engaging with a skill. It is a tool for refining and elevating your intuitive mastery. Simplification and desimplification are the tick-tock of learning. A "mastered" skill is not like a video game sword that, once forged, always has the exact same stats, but is more like a Formula 1 car that is continually disassembled, analyzed, and rebuilt.
The bell curve meme does occasionally get used to express a linear ignorance-struggle-mastery story of learning, but its origin and most common use is to caricature the pursuit of knowledge as pretentious foolishness.
If you want a shorter version, "grug brain, monk brain" pretends to profound, like "Zen mind, beginner's mind," but it's just a lazy take. If "grug brain, monk brain" was poetry, it would say:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And it'll look exactly the same because travel is pointless.
That thread felt like I was talking crazy pills. So many people confused by the difference between the construction of numbers using some particular set of foundational axioms and the properties of numbers that should hold true _regardless of the constructions_. Obviously the "integer 1" is not strictly speaking "the same as" the "rational number 1" when constructed in set theory, but there's a natural embedding of the integers into the rationals that preserves all the essential properties of the integer 1 when it's represented as the rational number 1. Confusing the concept with the encoding, basically.
