Productive language (the ability to talk) is different from receptive language (the ability to understand). There’s a lot of other processing involved in productive language. You have to pronounce the phonemes right, and that tends to foul up your sequencing capacity if you’re not fluent. It’s not true that literacy interferes with language learning. What is true is that, in any case, the person needs to be able to make mistakes without being blamed for them. Children become fluent in their mother tongue by making innumerable mistakes. That’s how you find out what works as a child, and the same thing is true as an adult. Language learning by children is not a competitive sport, and it is not a dumb turf game. Every child must learn to speak her mother tongue, and whatever it takes to do that is provided automatically, primarily by the mother. If human beings weren’t hard-wired to do this, the race wouldn’t have survived this long. It long since would have died out from boredom, stupidity, and just irreversible dysfectitude.
But then, what of the adult? How dare you deviate from the norm by poaching on the precious secrets of another culture by learning its language? Your mother tongue itself, which has dominated and monopolized the language centers of your brain, will fight you in this thoroughly questionable, if not foolish, and even outright unethical project. Let alone the self-appointed guardians of the cultural thresholds and the boundaries, particularly in the East Asian case. Every mistake you make is not only NOT to be understood as a necessary part of language learning, but it is also proof of your fundamental worthlessness as a human being, and that will then be trumpeted to everybody in the area, in a language you can only half understand. But you will understand the intention, and you will understand the profound hypocrisy of this in the Buddhist case. Not to mention what can then happen outside of your Sangha, when your productive language starts finally kicking in, perhaps in the middle of the night, and then you have idiots accusing you of “talking to yourself.” Hey! Rehearsing all the retorts that I couldn’t think of at the time isn’t talking to myself. Those people can hear me, right across the island. That they may not know that about themselves yet is NOT my problem.
Of course, that kind of hypocrisy doesn’t hold up over time in a practicing Sangha. In a practicing East Asian Buddhasangha, cultural chauvinism and the hypocrisy thereof are quantum phenomena. Now you see them, and now you don’t. There are windows when their practice bears fruit, and then you can talk to them. Hopefully, our own equivalent windows coincide in some cases, and then there is something called communication that can happen. You may have heard of it. Human beings enjoy it, and I’ve heard that it’s fun. I believe that communication has even been mentioned by Ven. Xing Yun. Perhaps we should consider its value.
Children become fluent in their mother tongues between one and three years of age. The adult, to be come fluent in a second language, must be able to regress herself to the psychological state of a child, without falling into the “no” syndrome (aka the anal stage of psychological development) of terrible two’s. That’s why, in general, adults just never become fluent in a second language. It’s not the alien symbol system that is the hang-up; it’s the humiliation of being that vulnerable as an adult. But practicing Buddhists are different. We do necessarily become that vulnerable, just by fruition of our practice, and therefore those few Buddhists who actually practice on a regular basis do routinely become fluent in languages other than their mother tongues as adults.
This is one of the great resons why America needs Buddhism. Only Buddhists, as whole Sanghas, have the conscious skills that enable us to sit on the East-West cultural interface until we understand both sides, and therefore can bring benefit from each side to the other.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
