Yajnadatta and the Dream

There is a parable that is recounted in the Surangama Sutra which I would like to briefly describe. The parable still mystifies me, but maybe I can flesh out what is so intriguing about it. This parable talks about Yajnadatta, who one day stares into a mirror to find himself enchanted with the image in front of him. He becomes so enthralled with the image that he temporarily forgets that the head is his own head. He starts to believe that he has lost his head, and had somehow become a headless spirit. Finally, the man runs around believing he has no head. Here is how the Buddha describes it in the text:

Have you not heard of Yajnadatta, the man from Sravasti who saw a face with perfectly clear features in the mirror one morning and became enraptured with it? Then he became upset because he supposed he had lost his own face. It struck him that he must have turned into a headless ghost. For no good reason he ran madly out of the house.  What do you think? What caused this man to run madly about for no reason? (p.159)

The Buddha uses this parable to show Purna, one of his listeners, that the grasping mind is fundamentally deluded. Only a very deluded person, after all, would look into a mirror, forget that the face is her or his own, and then get upset over the perceived loss. And yet, we do this all the time. For example, I think that what I see is somehow separate from me,  and I then start to chase after things that I think I need in order to be a whole person.

              Plenty of times, I am sure that many people go through the stage of being enthralled with beautiful things. I know I certainly do. I don’t realize that it is I who endows those things with beauty. What is more, they are not separate from me in the first place. It is the nature of the dream that I fool myself into thinking something is separate from my nature, so I go and chase after it. But does it last? Does anything last for that matter? I am considering, perhaps the person who awakens from the dream realizes that the head was always a reflection after all. She or he doesn’t trouble whether there is a ‘real’ head or ‘false’ head, or whether it is ‘mine’ or ‘not mine’. That is because the dream starts to be seen for what it is, and the magnetic pull of that dream vanishes. But as long as I am following the dream, I am trying to get out of it using the contents of the dream themselves as guides. I try to sort out which appearance is ‘real’ and which is ‘false’; which is ‘outside me’ and what is ‘inside me’;  what is ‘pure’ and what is ‘a mixture of things’, etc. And all this sorting through leads to philosophies, many of which are devoted to helping me get what I want from the dream itself.

Yajnadatta seems haunted by the fact that what he sees in the mirror is somehow feeling more ‘real’ than what he thinks is between his shoulders! Had he perhaps wakened to the fact that both image and ‘real’, ‘true’ and ‘false’ are in the same dream, his panic would have vanished. Knowing that it is a dream, he would have let go of his distinctions and his hard efforts to establish distinctions in his mind, which only create more fear and vexations for him. But letting go is so hard, isn’t it? It takes a lot of dedication even to do this ‘effortless effort’ of letting go. As the Buddha later remarks, “This is a teaching that must be left behind, and the leaving behind, too, must be left behind” (p.164)

I think that for me, life vacillates between the allurements of the world and the allurements of the spirit. When I am allured by the world, I want the kinds of fleshly things that comfort my body and existence, including food and companionship. When I am allured by the spirit, I somehow want to find a pure place where I am not assailed by any thoughts or desires whatsoever. And I spend my time, even waste my time, trying to create these impossible distinctions. Then I put myself down for failing to attain these very distinctions I set up in my mind! The ego seems to work this way: by setting up a reflection, thinking it needs to have that reflection, then hating the fact that it can’t be its reflection. Life then becomes a struggle of love and hate, desire and attainment.

To my limited understanding, practice (in meditation) is not this way. It asks the more fundamental question: what is the source of all the reflections?  It starts with this question and stays with this question. And it maintains the question through faith. Even watching the breath is a question. It is something that is not mind, but it not not in mind either. Observing its nature, stripped of thinking, I might just start to see the nature of all things. It’s not about gaining or attaining anything, and in some ways, it has nothing to do with other people. It is turning to this fundamental nature of being, when we stop getting confused by reflections.

References

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