Buddha Tianyi

The 464th case from Dahui’s Treasury,

Master Tianyi Huai said to an assembly,

An ancient said, "A single space on the mountain of five clusters; we go out and in the same door without meeting each other. For countless ages dwelling in a rented house, after all we never know the landlord." An old adept brought this up and said, "Since we don't know him, who do we ask to rent to begin with?" Bringing it up this way is still far off. Why? You should know that on the road of the dead there is a place for the living to emerge; on the road of the living the dead are innumerable. Which is the innumerable dead on the road of the living, and which is the place for the living to emerge on the road of the dead? If you can find out, you remove your greasy headgear and shed your stinking shirt.

Dahui said, "The ancient Buddha Tianyi is indeed fine, but not yet good. Let patchrobed monks with eyes try to distinguish."

I talked with ewk about this case in a podcast episode that hasn't come out yet, but since the purpose of the podcast is to get more conversations out of it, I'll say a bit about what we said there. We talked about how if you ask yourself something like, "what is the rented house?" and give an answer, then you are committing to explaining how the rest of what's being said makes sense with your interpretation.

I said the first thing that I thought of with the rented house was the body, and ewk said (IIRCC) that it could also be the dharma. So with that in mind we can think about a few things. What's the landlord according to those two answers? How does it fit with the rest of what he said about the road of the living and the road of the dead? Does it all fit together?

From my perspective it makes sense that, in terms of the body, he begins by talking about the five clusters, which basically are what your experience of the world is made of. The things that come through your senses which are mediated by your body. In that experience, we are never privy to what other's experience is. We never meet their experience, only our experience of them.

So we have this meat body that we know doesn't last forever, and we don't know were it fundamentally comes from. Right? Not in an immediate sense, of course, most people know their parents, and even if they don't, we ultimately don't know why there's even matter in the first place. So eventually we reach a place where we just don't know why things are the way they are. So we come into this world and borrow a spot in it for a while. But borrow from who?

That's the question Tianyi says is not the point. That is a huge statement from him.

Why is it not the point? Right after that he brings the road of the living and the road of the dead. Taking into account what he just said I think it means that even when pursuing those questions that are not the point there is a way for people to understand. To become enlightened.

Submitted April 03, 2023 at 04:33AM by astroemi https://ift.tt/KbfPG6g