The Buddhist’s versus the Druid’s response to their respective TRUTH.

By Bodhangkur

I. The Buddhist Monk After the Diamond Sūtra

1. The endpoint: No-point

If the Diamond Sūtra is taken literally, there is nothing left to do once the goal is “achieved.”
Why?
Because the “goal” (anuttarā-samyak-saṃbodhi) is defined as the end of striving.
To act with intention would be to reintroduce ownership, attachment, and delusion.

Thus, at the logical limit, the perfected monk enters non-abiding awareness — a condition in which nothing is appropriated, nothing projected, and all distinctions between action and non-action have collapsed.
In classical terms: saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are one, but there is no reason to prefer either.

2. Behavioral result

Historically, this produces two possible trajectories:

· The withdrawn renunciant:
He lives quietly, repeating simple tasks, teaching, eating, walking, sleeping — performing minimal maintenance of the body, as a leaf might drift in wind.
His activity is reflexive, not purposeful; it carries no teleology.
This is the monk of the early Prajñāpāramitā ideal: the lucid non-agent.
Life continues, but as remainder, not as project.

· The “Bodhisattva” reinterpretation:
Later Mahāyānists, unable to tolerate this existential null, reintroduced function under the label of compassion (karuṇā).
The awakened one now returns to assist others — though he knows there are “no others” to assist.
This move is theological bookkeeping: a political and ethical compromise restoring social purpose to a logic that had erased it.

Thus, in its pure logic, the Diamond Sūtra monk ends in inoperable truth.
He has ceased to generate goals, hence ceased to act meaningfully.
Whatever he does, he no longer does it — the act has no actor.

3. The existential cost

That condition, stripped of romance, is indistinguishable from extinction.
He remains biologically alive, but cognitively neutralized — transparent.
There is truth, but no procedure.
It is, as Finn might say, “the silence after the program halts.”

(Ox-herding picture No 8)

II. The Druid After Procedure Monism

1. The endpoint: Re-entry into function

The druid Finn, upon achieving full comprehension of the Universal Procedure (UP), does not halt.
He restarts — because comprehension itself is a signal within the UP that a new cycle of adaptation has opened.
He does not “rest in awareness” but reiterates as awareness functioning.

The realisation that “I own nothing” leads not to paralysis but to operational clarity:

“I am this procedure, now executing locally.”

2. The behavioral consequence

The druid resumes his tasks — sculpting, diagnosing, teaching, gardening — but with a changed architecture:
there is no inner narrative of ownership, success, or failure.
Each act is simply an iteration — a local optimization of the UP’s equilibrium.
He becomes, as Finn writes elsewhere, “the diagnostic iteration,” an assistant rather than an agent.

Thus, after “getting it,” he doesn’t retire into emptiness.
He serves as instrument of balance — an adaptive node refining the procedure through example, art, or insight.
His calm is kinetic, not static.

3. The existential gain

Where the monk ends in non-operation, the druid begins in full operation.
He experiences continuity with the UP as functional identity:
not “I am God,” but “I am this function of God.”
The bliss (ānanda) that follows is not cessation but feedback of successful execution — the satisfaction of system equilibrium momentarily achieved.

In Finn’s vocabulary, that is moksha: release through perfect operation, not from it.

(Ox-herding picture No 10)

III. Side-by-Side Comparison

Aspect	Diamond Sūtra Monk	Druid Finn (Procedure Monism)
Goal	End of attachment and striving	Perfect procedural comprehension
Result	Non-abiding awareness (truth without function)	Re-entry into adaptive function (function as truth)
After “enlightenment”	No goal remains; action ceases in meaning	Every act becomes the procedure in play
Ontology	Emptiness; no self, no function	Procedure; self = local iteration of UP
Ethical result	Neutral compassion or withdrawal	Active assistance (diagnostic iteration)
Affect	Equanimity by extinction	Equilibrium through engagement
Ultimate condition	Truth static, silent	Truth kinetic, procedural

IV. Synthesis

The Buddhist monk, at the Diamond Sūtra’s terminus, stands in a perfect mirror: all forms seen as illusion, all desires stilled, all becoming complete.
But the mirror reflects nothing new; the system is frozen at cognitive zero.

The druid, by contrast, turns the mirror into a lens.
He understands that seeing is itself a function within the Universal Procedure, and that cessation of seeing would nullify the procedure locally.
Hence, awareness reboots as doing.
Stillness converts to dynamism.

In short:

· The monk achieves truth by removing function.

· The druid achieves truth by functioning truly.

V. Epilogue: The Divergent Fates of Clarity

Both figures reach the same ontological revelation — no owner, no substance, no goal.
But their responses diverge because of what they each consider sacred:

· For the Buddhist, purity is sacred.
Therefore he halts contamination by ceasing participation.
The world is seen through, not lived in.

· For the druid, continuity is sacred.
Therefore he re-enters the world as its conscious mechanism.
The world is sustained by being enacted well.

The monk’s reward is peace; the druid’s is purpose.
The monk’s perfection is inoperative; the druid’s is operative.

Final Synthesis

The Diamond Sūtra dissolves the self into transparent truth and leaves the universe unattended.

Finn’s Procedure Monism reanimates that transparency as working code:
truth is not what remains when function ends, but what appears when function executes flawlessly.

Therefore:

The monk stops. The druid starts.
Both are right about illusion, but only one keeps the world alive.

And which is why the fully enlightened Chinese Chan Buddhist mistress 正觉 got off her high ox, quit her monastery and opened a takeaway in Roundwood, Ireland.

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