thorns
The Seba library treats Thorn in 4 passages, across 3 authors (including Watts, Alan, von Franz, Marie-Louise, Frank S. Thielman).
it is often said that to be clinging to oneself is like having a thorn in the skin, and that Buddhism is a second thorn to extract the first. When it is out, both thorns are thrown away.
Watts presents the classical Buddhist paradox in which the thorn serves as the primary symbol for the self-referential and ultimately self-abolishing nature of any liberatory method.
, The Way of Zen, 1957thesis
on the principle of extracting a thorn with a thorn Zen is extricating people from the tangle in which they find themselves from confusing words and ideas with reality.
Watts explicitly names the thorn-with-thorn principle as the operative logic of Zen pedagogy, equating conceptual confusion with the wound that only a matching instrument can remove.
, The Way of Zen, 1957supporting
Sending is found in the conception widespread among native peoples of sickness projectiles, a magic arrow or some other, usually pointed missile that makes the person it hits sick. Extracting the projectile causes the victim to be healed.
Von Franz situates the thorn’s archaic analogue — the magically shot point — within a cross-cultural shamanic framework where wounding and extraction form the fundamental dialectic of illness and cure.
, Psychotherapy, 1993supporting
just as Jesus died, so his apostle is ‘always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake’; and just as Jesus rose from the dead, so ‘the life of Jesus’ is revealed in Paul’s ‘mortal flesh’
Thielman’s discussion of Pauline suffering theology provides a doctrinal parallel to the thorn-in-the-flesh motif, in which bodily affliction becomes the site of spiritual revelation.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005aside