The fox case

Following is one of the fun passages the Huangbo gives us. I’m putting the sentences out of order; if you think it disrupts in a relatively harmful way, explain yourself.

It was for fear that people would not believe this that he drew upon what is seen with the five sorts of vision and spoken with the five kinds of speech.

No matter how ingrained Huangbo was in buddhist culture, he preached something that stands outside of it, as did buddha. His own admission is that it is fear that produced five sorts of vision and spoken with the five kinds of speech.

Here he admits there may be some people that need those things, but he also clearly separates his message from it (or rather sheds it as he reiterates buddha’s essential point before it became a religion/process).

In the same paragraph he not only separated his message, but also clearly talked about the ineffectiveness of ‘seeking’:

when the people of the world hear it said that the Buddhas transmit the Doctrine of the Mind, they suppose that there is something to be attained or realized apart from Mind, and thereupon they use Mind to seek the Dharma, not knowing that Mind and the object of their search are one. Mind cannot be used to seek something from Mind; for then, after the passing of millions of aeons, the day of success will still not have dawned. Such a method is not to be compared with suddenly eliminating conceptual thought, which is the fundamental Dharma

Lastly, he is very clear in how seeking has nothing to do with the fundamental dharma using this cool story (the main reason for this post):

Suppose a warrior, forgetting that he was already wearing his pearl on his forehead, were to seek for it elsewhere, he could travel the whole world without finding it. But if someone who knew what was wrong were to point it out to him, the warrior would immediately realize that the pearl had been there all the time. ...when the warrior found his pearl, he merely discovered what had been hanging on his forehead all the time; and just as his finding of it had nothing to do with his efforts to discover it elsewhere...

Remember that Huangbo is there at the fox case:

A teacher of old gave a wrong answer and became a wild fox for five hundred lifetimes. What if he hadn't given a wrong answer?

Submitted March 11, 2018 at 11:42PM by TFnarcon9 http://ift.tt/2Fv2Wy7