Hongzhi talks about Zen.

The Subtlety of Zen

To learn the subtlety of Zen you must clarify your mind and immerse your spirit in silent exercise of inner gazing. When you see into the source of reality, with no obstruction whatever, it is open and formless, like water in autumn, clear and bright, like the moon taking away the darkness of night.

Spontaneous Knowledge

All realms of phenomena rise from one mind, When the one mind is quiescent, all appearances end. Then which is other, which is self?

Because there are no differentiated appearances at such a time, nothing at all is defined, not a single thought is produced-you pass beyond before birth and after death: the mind becomes a point of subtle light, round and frictionless, without location, without traces. Then your mind cannot be obscured.

This point where there can be no obscuration is called spontaneous knowledge. Just this realm of spontaneous knowledge is called the original attainment. Nothing whatsoever is attained from outside.

Zen Experience

When you are empty and spontaneously aware, clean and spontaneously clear, you are capable of panoramic consciousness without making an effort to grasp perception, and you are capable of discerning understanding without the burden of conditioned thought. You go beyond being and nothingness, and transcend conceivable feelings. This is only experienced by union with it-it is not gotten from another.

Enlightened Awareness

Buddhas and Zen masters do not have different realizations, they all reach the point of cessation, where past, present, and future are cut and all impulses stop, where there is not the slightest object. Enlightened awareness shines spontaneously, subtly penetrating the root source.

Everyone's Zen

Ever since the time of the Buddha and the founders of Zen, there has never been any distinction between ordained and lay people, in the sense that everyone who has accurate personal experience of the realization is said to have entered the school of the enlightened mind and penetrated the source of religion.

Shedding Your Skin

The experience described as shedding your skin, transcending reflections of subjective awareness, where no mental machinations can reach, is not transmitted by sages. It can only be attained inwardly. by profound experience of spontaneous illumination. The original light destroy the darkness, real illumination mirrors the infinite. Subjective assessments of what is or is not are all transcended.

Comments: emphasis added

These quotes from Hongzhi come from Cleary's Zen Essence.

Honhzgi gives a description of the experience of One Mind that matches my own and the Hsin Hsin Ming:

the mind becomes a point of subtle light, round and frictionless, without location, without traces

Hongzhi is also directly saying here what I have been:

Realization of one mind is a transcendental experience that realizes your identity as One Mind.

The path is to drop conceptualizations in an 'silent exercise of inner gazing'.

The true results of what is pointed to in Zen are only felt after this realization.

Thoughts?

Submitted August 13, 2020 at 10:49PM by NothingIsForgotten https://ift.tt/2XYr1Jc