In "Exhortations on Investigating Chan", Master Boshan notes, "[D]o not be stained by or attached to worldly dharmas in the course of practice" (Master Sheng Yen, Attaining the Way, p.10). What are worldly dharmas? During the Dharma talk the other day, Chang Yuan Fashi described how practice needs to go beyond worldly appearances. If we cling to appearances, we are putting our faith on things that are not permanent and therefore not truly real. He used the example of a young boy who is attracted to an 18 year old girl who does not like him, but is then told by Fashi that there is an 80 year old wealthy woman who is attracted to him. Which would he choose? Fashi used this example to point to the fickle nature of desires; in fact, the 18 year old girl will eventually become just like the 80 year old woman. I think the deeper point to make is how, when we feel craving, we assume that what we crave is going to be the same forever. We reify the object of desire into something static and seemingly unchanging.
To go back to the text, I think that worldly dharmas are precisely what makes us identify with the self. We sometimes think of life as a competition to acquire the best, to be the most popular or most well-liked, and to look disparagingly at others if they seem to be getting more attention or credit. This way of thinking stems from a deep insecurity that comes from identifying ourselves with the body. Beneath the desire for popularity, acceptance, etc. is the fear of what life is like when we are alone or feel abandoned. In fact, when we recognize the abandonment feeling as something from our childhood and can embrace that that moment has passed, then we can move forward with our life. We can truly love life without clinging to certain parts of it out of fear, insecurity or the desire to be validated by worldly things. In this way, as Fashi put it yesterday, we can cultivate unified mind: the sense that, rather than "me" being "in this body", in fact "all of this is me".
When illusions are “shattered by contact with reality,” Virginia Woolf observes, the collision “leaves the mind rocking from side to side” and makes for “a moment fraught with the highest danger for the human spirit.” With her uncommon gift for poetic truth, she defends the vitalizing power of our illusions:
ReplyDeleteIllusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
Perhaps our illusions, like all wishful or magical thinking, contain core truths about who we are — after all, our hopes and fears both spring from and in turn inform our identity. Perhaps, then, our illusions are an even more truthful record of our becoming than the biographical facts of our lives. They grow as we grow, until we shed them like snakeskin when they no longer serve us, only to replace them with new ones. Woolf’s Orlando intuits this when she whispers to herself: “I am growing up… I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones.”