While translating Total Exertion, I realised ChatGPT likes to turn it into 'wholeness'. I gathered the following quotations to correct ChatGPT.
John Tan said years ago:
"Though wholeness can also be said to be beyond space and time, it is an entity concept. But total exertion is totally exerted as an activity. All becomes that activity. When you write, everything is contributing in the activity of writing. Subsuming into all-embracing consciousness is a wholeness and oneness experience also."
"In total exertion, we should not only understand from the standpoint of wholeness but as one functioning, one action. When you breathe, the tree, the air, the lung, the heart, the mind, ears, eyes, toes, and the body are one functioning of breathing. There's no eye, no toes, no body, as all transcend their conventionalities into the single function. Do you understand the difference? When you say this breath is also the breath you breathed ten thousand years ago, you have totally exerted the infinite past into a single action of breathing. What does this mean? You would not call this wholeness, right? When you show me this passage of total exertion, Daowu or Dōgen are also participating in the communication of total exertion to you. If you can feel it, the past is as present and the ancient masters are as alive. If you can feel it not as beautiful words but as living experience, the whole lineage of ancient masters is transmitted without reserve, instantly."
"Freedom from all elaborations cannot be said to be "wholeness"; it is just "purity," free from all elaborations. Purity transcends both notions of parts and whole. Conventionally, parts and whole arise dependently."
"One must be able to discern clearly the difference between "wholeness" and "capacity to participate in togetherness." One is due to empty nature and therefore participates freely in dependence. Free of structures, it therefore assimilates all structures. The other has the scent of a fixed and definite structure (still an essence view). Empty in nature, consciousness never stands apart; there is no moment outside relation. Where conditions arise, it is precisely that event—sound in hearing, color in seeing, thought in thinking; where none, nothing is found to point to. Participation without a participant; dynamism without a whole."