Hsin Hsin Ming | Slice no. 8

 

I posted this yesterday, but some glitch messed it up which led me to delete it (since it was then unfinished).

If you’re out of the loop, I’ve been slicing the Hsin Hsin Ming step by step, and sometimes I look at different translations of the same “slice.”

Here’s slice number eight:

 

 

To understand the mystery of this One-essence

is to be released from all entanglements.

When all things are seen equally

the timeless Self-essence is reached.

No comparisons or analogies are possible

in this causeless, relationless state.

Consider motion in stillness

and stillness in motion;

both movement and stillness disappear.

When such dualities cease to exist

Oneness itself cannot exist.

To this ultimate finality

no law or description applies.

- Richard B. Clarke translation

 

 

When the mind refrains from differentiation,
the ten thousand phenomena are a single Suchness,
a single Suchness dark in entity,
lumpish, forgetful of entanglements.

View the ten thousand phenomena as equal
and all will revert to naturalness.
The very basis of their being wiped out,
impossible to rate one above the other!

Arrest motion, and motion ceases to exist;
move stillness and stillness is gone.
But when neither comes into being,
how can even a single thing exist?

- Burton Watson translation

 

 

In the profound essence of One Suchness, you look ignorant and forget the secondary causes.

The insight that the ten thousand things are on the same level is returning home and restoring naturalness.

Destroying that place of instrumentality it is not possible to go in the direction of comparisons.

By stopping activity without activity, activity is stopped without stopping.

Pairs are de facto not complete; the One, how does that exist?

In the end, impoverished to the utmost, do not live by (following) tracks and rules.

- Gregory Wonderwheel translation

 

 

UExis: When the shorter verses from Richard and Burton become almost like hymns, the longer and more descriptive sentences of Gregory might go through.

 

 

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Submitted June 14, 2020 at 07:24PM by UExis https://ift.tt/2AxtFwI