Degeneracy

All communication is error prone. Some kinds of communication are more error prone than others. Even digital communication is error prone, unless steps are made to prevent the introduction of bit-errors. When it comes to transmission of teachings in traditions of Spiritual Disciplines such as Taiji, or the teachings of a religion such as Christianity, things are still error prone. It is tempting to appeal to some kind of 'magic spiritual force' to believe that transmission is perfect: to see our teacher as perfect and incapable of teaching wrongly, and whose teachings are always received perfectly; or to see some scripture as inerrant, and incapable of being wrongly read or interpreted. This is a trap many fall into. And in so doing, errors accumulate in lineages of teaching, and followers of those lineages readily believe that no such errors have accrued. Likewise, along with errors, details of teaching are lost in transmission, with each teacher only imparting a fraction of their understanding to their students. The result is what I call degeneracy: a tradition's content will naturally gravitate to what is easy to learn and what is easy to transmit with minimal errors, and will fall away from its core meanings and teachings. Religions degenerate into fundamentalism and empty traditions and rituals; martial arts degenerate into ritualistic collections of dances. This is a tragic reality of all lineages and traditions, is something that we can and must accept happens, and having accepted this, work earnestly to minimise the errors that pass through us.