Awakening to the Source: Yajnadata’s Dream (Again)

       The Surangama Sutra, Chapter 4 of Part IV is subtitled “Delusion Has No Basis”. But what does it mean, exactly?  I don’t claim to have the answers, and I am much too amateur to be able to discern the wisdom of the chapter. But it does inspire me in some sense to elaborate on what it might mean in daily life. I will try to elaborate in the most non-technical way possible.

   
      The story of Yajnadata is that he looks in the mirror, becomes enraptured with the appearance in the mirror, and then thinks that his head is not on his body anymore. The story, to me, represents how people mistakenly believe that distinctions they make are outside of them. It is a bit like a chess player who represents both players, then mistakenly believes that she is playing against herself. Rather than seeing that the distinctions arise from the mind, one literally ‘breathes life’ into those distinctions. What belonged to oneself in the first place becomes a kind of disembodied phantom. I relate to the idea that a lot of our fears are created from the tendency to project awareness into the things we see. Pictures are not just pictures anymore. Rather, they start to represent people we interact with from the past. We think that the picture has awareness, when in fact it is just an image on a piece of paper. In a similar way, we continue to interact with phenomena around us as though they had an awareness of their own.

       Purna’s question in this section of the Sutra is an interesting one. He is asking why beings “cover” their true understanding “so that they continue to be submerged in samsara” (p.159). The question might be framed as, is Yajnadata’s confusion caused by something ‘real’, or is he just imagining that he is confused? It seems that Yajnadata’s confusion is not real. The tricky thing about this analogy is, it is similar to being in a dream. When one is dreaming, one may think of all sorts of reasons why ‘things are happening’ the way they are. I might think in the dream that I am running away from a tiger because the tiger is ferocious. But if I know I am dreaming, are any of these causes ‘real’? Trying to figure out ‘why’ I am running from the tiger starts to seem ridiculous when I realize that it’s just a dream. At that point, I can start to relate to the parts of the dream in a different way. I am not as attached to the outcome, because I start to feel that all outcomes are of the mind, and there are many ways to respond and relate to those outcomes. If I think that causes are so ‘real’ that there is no choice in how to respond to them, that is when they start to feel too constricting.

          Trying to find the cause of something can be draining. Is it necessary to do so? I wonder.

          Today, as I was sitting in the introductory class I co-facilitate, I had the usual body pains. But as I recited huatou, there was this experience of not really being restricted to the sensations of the body. While they are there, I wasn’t identified to the body itself. Instead, my awareness seemed to be not so easy to locate in a grid of space. If my awareness is only in the body, how can the outside environment be known? The more I could question the location of the mind, the less constricted I felt to whatever feelings were arising. Rather than locating myself in this collapsing experience of ‘the body’ (think of a black hole, where I am the center), I started to experience a flow of phenomena that don’t have a central self. There isn’t a solid watcher or a solid ‘watched’. 

            Had Yajnadata not been so attached with the view that he is ‘watching’ an image of himself, would he have felt so frightened by that image? Would he have thought that he had turned into a headless ghost? If he had been practicing huatou, he might explore whether there is a boundary between who he is, and where the image of the head is. He might see that he didn’t lose his head after all. But he would also not be attached to the image of who he thinks he should be. So, I see two problems. The first is that Yajnadata thinks the head is separate from him, and desires to have the head for himself. The second problem is that Yajnadata cannot realize that he already is and has what he felt he was missing. This is the case of projecting who one is onto an image and then desiring that image as though it were oneself.

       What kind of funny knots do I create in daily life? This is where the sutra really needs to come down to the practice of the everyday. I think the one thing I do a lot is project. I project my thoughts and ideas without realizing that they are my own creations, not something outside of me. Most of what I desire is a projection of the ideal state of ‘me’: the person I want to be, with all the things that I think will make me feel ‘whole’. Sometimes that image of who I want to be and what I want to have feels more ‘real’ to me than my present state. It overshadows my present state, in fact. When I lose the opportunity to have the things I desire in the ‘picture of myself’, what happens? I panic. I lose the sense of where mind is right now. And I spin into wanting to know how to recover this ‘picture of me’ back again. Not only that, but my whole body will feel discomfort if things in the present don’t potentially match with the picture of the future. Is this not a little like Yajnadata seeing his face in the mirror, and then thinking he lost his head?

      A similar thing happens in my interactions with other people. If there is someone who fascinates me and that person doesn’t have time to engage me, what happens? I start to wonder how I can win this person’s attention. I struggle. I forget the things that need to be done in the moment, and instead engage in the image of this fascinating person. Then I start to feel incomplete unless I can somehow win the heart of this person. But do I really know who this person is? Am I using awareness to understand? Or am I seeing something in the phenomena that isn’t there?

     From my limited understanding of the Chan view, the antidote is not to chase after the appearances. It is not even to establish an identity that is separate from appearances. Both solutions don’t work. In the first case, I am creating attachments from a false sense of who “I” and who “others” are. I then proceed to differentiate self from others, and pursue things conducive to the sense of self I create. In the second case, I am assuming that my true mind is separate from the appearances and needs to be ‘purified’ of appearances. But both don’t work because one is still trying to interact with a dream as though it were real, or had substantial things to capture and preserve. I believe that the answer to this is to try to understand the source of all the appearances in mind, including the “I”. In this way, I don’t presuppose an “I” to begin with. This practice is  a little like stripping a coat-rack of all the individual knobs through which one can hang one’s coat, hat, umbrella, etc. There is nothing to start to ‘hang’ a notion of self to, so all the other cravings for objects start to dissolve.

References

The Surangama Sutra: With Excerpts from the Commentary by the Venerable Master Hssuan Hua. A New Translation (2009) Buddhist Text Translation Society.