Expand enlightenment, and the mind is always calm; go along with things, and consciousness runs at a gallop. I only wish to be rich in enlightenment though personally poor, generous with virtue though emotionally aloof.
Here, I am thus every day, thus all the time. But tell me, what is “thus”? Try to express it outside of discriminatory consciousness, intellectual assessments, and verbal formulations.
This reality is not susceptible to your intellectual understanding. Now those who think, attend, and reflect all have some intellectual understanding; but then when they turn back to examine their own eyes and think of the mind that thinks, at this point why do people unknowingly say, “It has never been blue, yellow, red, or white; it has no appearance, no form” ? I tell you, this is what I call talk; it is not your original mind.
How can you think of your original mind? How can you see your own eye? When you are looking inward, furthermore, there is no seeing subject. Some people swallow this in one gulp, so their eye of insight opens wide and they immediately arrive at their homeland.
How can people nowadays reach the point where there is no seeing and no hearing? Everything is always there; you see people, houses, and all sorts of forms, like boiling water bubbling.
When you were infants, you also heard sounds and saw forms, but you didn’t know how to discriminate. Once you came to the age of reason, then you listened to discriminatory thinking, and from that time on have suffered a split between the primal and the temporal.
At this point, it is inevitably hard for people to restore natural order even if they want to. Those who attain enlightenment do not see walking when they walk, and do not see sitting when they sit. That is why the Buddha said, “The eyes seeing forms is equivalent to blindness; the ears hearing sounds is equivalent to deafness.”
How can we say we are as if blind and deaf? When we hear sound, there is no sound to be heard; when we see form, there is no form to be seen. What we see and hear is all equivalent to an echo. It is like seeing all sorts of things in a dream—is there all that when you wake up?
If you say yes, yet there’s only the blanket and pillow on the bed; if you say no, yet all those things are clearly registered in your mind, and you can tell what they were. The same is true of what you see and hear now in broad daylight.
So it is said, what can be seen by the eye or heard by the ear can be studied in the scriptures and treatises; but what about the basis of awareness itself — how do you study that?
hookdump's commentary:
This reminds me a little bit to the ability of the human eye to perceive the polarization of light. You need to know where to look, and how to look, and if you try too hard you won't be able to see it. (That's what I refer to when I keep yapping about looking "gently").
I often ramble about emotions, biases, blind spots, etc. I don't think that's what Zen Masters talked about; but I think these are very sneaky traps that get in the way of seeing one's nature.
How can you study your own glasses? Well, take them off, and inspect them.
What if you need your glasses to see anything at all? Well... just wear your glasses and look at them through a mirror.
What if the mirror is very dirty? Perhaps clean it up first!
What if no matter how hard you clean it up, it always remains dirty?
What if you have cataracts?
What if you're blind?
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Submitted February 05, 2019 at 08:00AM by hookdump http://bit.ly/2t1ZzdA
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