Another from the collection of Master Ying-an's teachings from Chan Instructions (Cleary).
This is the full letter:
Teachings requested by daughters six and seven of the Hu family
An ancestral teacher said, “The mind is inherently the original mind; the original mind is not an existent phenomenon. If there are phenomena, there is the original mind; if it is not mind, it is not a fundamental reality.”
If you want to see the subtle mind of the founding teachers, that is an extremely easy matter; just step back and bring it up and take it up energetically while walking, standing, sitting, and lying down, while drinking tea and eating meals, while absorbed in conversation, while observing the afflictions of the world—then the mind understood by the founding teachers and the mind you yourself experience are not two, have no division, no distinction, no discontinuity; so its awesome light shines bright and you attain great freedom.
Are you not then a real Wayfarer beyond convention?
Time and time again we hear the same teaching. Step back, look. Where?
"Facing south gazing at the North Star."
Master Ni
"You're facing south to see the Great Bear!"
Master Yunmen
So what do we see with our eyes facing northwest but gazing southeast? Use your mind's eye to look 180 degrees back to where your eyes are staring. Tell me.
I see the colourless void without boundaries from which sight springs. I don't even need lit objective reality to have reality spring from this void. Phosphenes, dreamscapes, all visual phenomena come to be out of this non-being potential.
If you listen closely, it is the same as the silence from which sounds come.
The comfortable nothingness out of which the sense of touch arises, when it arises.
All phenomena are is distinctions arising, standing out by virtue of not being the void. If we group them under that definition, we could easily say they are one. When we say they arise from the fabric of that void, are made of it, then it includes the void in that oneness. When it all depends on itself in that intimate way, though things appear to come and go, it is really all empty of individual existence.
...
I know that we all share the same void, though phenomena differ. Your void can't be different from mine, for if it was, it would not be it. Like looking out of a ship through a porthole and starboardhole, we see different things, yet we look from the same ship.
So this ship we're on, Linji is in the galley shouting at the chef, Yunmen is in the head trying to find a clean shit stick, and Xuedou is sitting in his cabin versifying Zhaozhou's poor navigation skills, for he keeps confusing north, south, east and west.
Welcome aboard!
Submitted September 04, 2020 at 11:23AM by Coinionaire https://ift.tt/32UuFW1
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