(FoYan; T. Cleary's Instant Zen)
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?
(Blue Cliff Record; T. Cleary translation)
During the night DeShan entered LongTan's room and stood in attendance till late at night.
LongTan said, "Why don't you go?"
DeShan bade farewell, lifted up the curtain, and went out; he saw that it was dark outside, so he turned around and said, "It's dark outside."
LongTan lit a paper lantern and handed it to DeShan; as soon as DeShan took it, LongTan blew it out.
[At that moment,] DeShan was vastly and greatly enlightened.
Immediately he bowed to LongTan who said, "What have you seen that you bow?"
DeShan answered, "From now on I will never again doubt what's on the tongues of the venerable teaching masters [i.e. "The Zen Masters"] of the world."
(FoYan; Instant Zen)
The original Zen Masters are real true friends. Ha, ha, ha!
One can only say this much; if you understand, you can have the experience yourself. Then you will have something to act on.
If you get involved in rationalizations, comparisons, and verbalizations, then you do not understand, and you cannot experience it yourself.
When you are going about and doing your chores, do you see that the original Zen Masters are real true friends?
Submitted May 13, 2020 at 08:51PM by xXx_GreenSage_xXx https://ift.tt/2WsDJzh
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