Saturday, 4 March 2023

Empty Solidity

“One piece of empty solidity, beyond saying and feeling.” With a single line, Hsueh Tou has versified it well: naturally he can see the Ancient’s meaning. What is it that the six senses are brimming with? It’s just this one mass, empty and bright, solid and quiescent. You don’t need to go to heaven to look for it. You don’t have to seek it from someone else. The perpetual light spontaneously appears before us: right here in this very place it towers up like a mile-high wall, beyond verbal appellation and mental sense.

-Verse commentary of BCR case 90.

I think this quote can be used in the debate about some commonly talked about translation issues.

First more allusions to Self that sound like Huineng's Lamp and Light. "Empty and bright" and "perpetual light". Awareness/Dhyana.

The Self "towering like a mile high wall". Bodhidharma wasn't staring at a wall for 9 years meditating. He was the wall.



Submitted March 05, 2023 at 07:37AM by koancomentator https://ift.tt/Zor1x2u

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