"Deception of Perception"

During the Dharma talk tonight at Emmanuel College Chapel, Venerable Yan Ben had talked about The Platform Sutra, in which he had mentioned the two major concepts which underlie the treatment of suchness: namely, impermanence (temporal) and dependent arising (spatial). His account of dependent arising interested me, as he used the example of people coming into the Chan Hall and then disappearing to do other things. The arrangement certainly looks very permanent, especially when the classroom is a regular place for people to learn. However, things are constantly shifting, to the point where there is no graspable substance to hold onto that can be called my own.
   The second example that Venerable Yan Ben mentioned was that of the mani pearl, a kind of multifaceted, idealized pearl which reflects light around it in a crystalline form. According to Buddhist folklore, mani pearls are said to reflect perfectly all the colors and lights around it, thus creating a sense that they embody these colors. However, anyone who spends time around crystals will know that their light never actually really "belongs" to them in the end; they are only temporary conditional arrangements that are based on the plays of light, shadow and materials.
    According to the Platform Sutra, the way to achieve the straightforward mind is simply by not making any chains of thoughts, connecting past, present and future thinking. This way, we see the reflections of thoughts without thinking that those thoughts are solid objects, which is often what happens when we pile "thought upon thought". The more I dwell on one concept of who I am, either from feedback or from what people write and say about me, the more I start to create a reified concept of self which doesn't really have very much at all to do with the present mind. One often experiences this if they harbor some upset thought about someone, only to meet them later and realize that the person they are with is not the person they remember at all. In that instant, all resentment coming from the past memories is instantly vanished: the illusory aspect is not that those phenomena (anger, good, bad) did not appear in mind, but rather that they don't correspond to real things.
    I love the expression "deception of perception" which came up in one of Venerable Yan Ben's slides. What he means by this is that perceptions can be very deceiving if we are not careful and realize their true nature as impermanent. Again, the phenomena are definitely evident in mind (we don't get attached to the emptiness or "nothingness") but at the same time, we know that suffering arises when we take the images and phenomena as static and unchanging.