Daigidan: The Great Ball of Doubt

In some forms of Zen Buddhism, the aspiring student is given a problem to solve, whether it be a paradoxical koan, a probing question about the self, or some personal dilemma to which there appears to be no answer. This struggle of the student towards enlightenment is described as the creation in the student of a great mass or ball of doubt, called a daigidan. The more and more the student struggles with this problem, the more he or she becomes frustrated, lost, blocked, enmeshed and burdened down by this growing ball of doubt. Every examination of the problem reveals new difficulties; confusion ensnarls the world; the strings and strands of doubt multiply until the point is reached where everything in the universe seems to be entangled and paralyzed—all tied up in knots. Moreover, it is said that the greater the ball of doubt grows, the greater the moment of awakening when at last it finally comes. Into our hands, in our time, has been given a Great Ball of Doubt, perhaps the greatest ball of doubt there could possibly be: the Earth. It is an immense koan, the solution for which we are now, like Zen students, intensely and personally responsible: that is, our lives and futures depend on our being able to unravel the knots of its mysterious burden. The solving of such a mystery is internal to it (unlike a problem that stands outside of us), and the realization that the planet has finite boundaries has caused an “implosion of sensibility”—a vast cultural struggle between those who have internalized this finiteness, and those who still persist in believing in an infinite planet, with infinite resources, occupied by humans with infinite desires. Instead, in order to solve this immense all-engulfing koan, we are being driven into new (and sometimes very old) forms of planetary embeddedness and immanence, and away from flights to some kind of irresponsible imaginary ranscendence.