Foyan Qingyuan [1067-1120]: Try to express it outside of discriminatory consciousness, intellectual assessments, and verbal formulations. This reality is not susceptible to your intellectual understanding.

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. How can you think of your original mind? How can you see your own eye? What can be seen by the eye or heard by the ear can be studied in the scriptures.

Foyan Qingyuan [1067-1120]: "Instant Zen: Waking Up in the Present", translated by Thomas Cleary, 1994

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Commentary and questions: What is that which is beyond discriminatory consciousness, intellectual assessments, and verbal formulations? Without study or aim it cannot be accessed or understood, but if one attempts to see it clearly with a sustained practice, the understanding of it may flash into awareness. What is 'it', and why can't it be expressed directly?

As the masters teach, picking and choosing does not reach it, because it is not as small or temporary as one's preferences. Blindly accepting ignorance is not it either. One could say that it is 'reality', but what about the reality that is not immediately grasped by the senses? Has that been accepted as mind even still?

We could use the word 'Dharma', which points in the right direction. 'Dharma' is the truth of all things, but 'truth' itself is still a falsehood, therefore any thoughts of the Dharma are still not complete. Any 'thing' among the myriad things that can be thought of or conceptualized isn't it, but tantalizingly, isn't not it either.

Submitted January 12, 2020 at 08:11PM by _WanderingRonin_ https://ift.tt/3a3dl3S