In Master Boshan's "What Beginning Chan Practitioners Should Know", we read: "If you cannot discover the Original Great Principle that is within you, the mind of birth and death will never be shattered" (p.7). What is the Original Great Principle? According to the footnote in Master Sheng Yen's Attaining the Way, it's, "buddha nature, self nature, or the truth of emptiness" (p.7). And how do we discover this? By not using discrimination to cut up the world into self, other, me, other, this that--a kind of world of blocks, when in fact the world is not this way at all. I could now stop and say "the world is interdependence", but when I think of this, I am still thinking using consciousness. I might imagine a kind of swirling vortex where "things" are dancing together and then separating, then dancing again--but this too is based on the illusory notion that there are "things" independent of mind. So this too won't work. I am still creating a world and then assuming "this is the way it is out there", as if I am the onlooker standing over it. What then is this "interdependence" anyway?
Who is asking?
I recall the concept that the flag neither stands still nor moves. "Moving" and "standing still" are all relative concepts, and from the perspective of mind, they don't ultimately exist. But we also know that the nature of emptiness is to be continually in flux. One moment can't be compared to the other. What I experience in this moment is all mind. Next moment is also mind; even if something has changed since the previous moment, nothing has changed from the perspective of mind (the clear primordial mind). So why do we say the mind is emptiness? Isn't it then a static mirror? This is the tricky part where I am getting stuck. I feel almost like there is relative emptiness (the impermanence and conditioned arising of all phenomena) and then ultimate emptiness (nothing really arises or disappears), but I have trouble connecting these together.
To use an example: we see the bird flying in the sky. From a relative perspective, the bird is only a temporary phenomena, because one minute, it's flying and the next, it's gone from our view. But consider from the perspective of ultimate mind. From the ultimate perspective, the bird is an image in our mind. But the image is only conditioned arising of elements. In fact, it (the image) has no independent reality from mind so it does not carry a "trace" with it into the next image of the bird. This is like the image on a tv screen. The image A only appears to be moving to image B, when in fact, each image is different. One doesn't actually move into another. So from the view of absolute emptiness, there is no connection between A and B. How then are they considered empty? I think it's because A and B appear without any interference. Because they don't really connect, there is no actual merging or "conflict": one doesn't disappear in order for the other to disappear. They are able to appear without any interference, in perfect harmony. That is because mind is identical with both images. Mind does not move from one image to the other. The image simply appears in mind. This is the principle of non-interference, non interaction, or total harmony. (Which is also a dream!) Perhaps this is an ultimate view of emptiness, whereas the relative view of emptiness still holds that things are born, change, die, transform into something else.
The important thing is maybe not what happens to phenomena under this view, but to keep looking for the mind that allows things to arise without interference. Then the nature of life really reveals itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment