The fundamental teaching

When we peel back the religious veneer, for over twenty-five hundred years Buddhism has fundamentally taught only one teaching and that is the direct contemplation of Mind.  This is not the mind that we are familiar with on an everyday basis.  This is not mind that is shaped into thoughts, various mental images or dimensionalized into this world.  It is not the mind of sensory consciousness or awareness, either.  This Mind is pure Mind without any modification.  It is Mind-only (cittamatra) which is pure as one might expect pure water to be water-only.  

In pure Mind there is no birth and no death.  Only in modified mind is there the plane of birth and death which appears again and again through desire.  For those who apprehend Mind correctly, they see beyond the pale of birth and death so as to make their refuge there.  Thus they put an end to the mind that is regenerating itself entering, again and again, into the plane of birth and death that makes up samsara.

If we think of pure Mind as the increate medium of all things, then all things are its forms or shapes which arise from this medium or matrix.  Because all things are its form, there is no need, if we wish to apprehend Mind, to look into things to find our answer.  Things cannot help us because they are ever changing unlike pure Mind.  Moreover, they are a disturbance (duhkha) of Mind.  Nor are they our true abiding self which is fundamentally the nature of Mind.

As we might expect, the search for Mind with a capital "M" is not easy since Mind, in its native purity, offers no trace of itself.  In the words of Zen master Huang-po, "This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible.  It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance.  It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new and old."

While this all sounds terribly difficult, there is a silver lining.  The good thing is that because mind is naturally incomplete (avidya), since it doesn't realize itself in its unmodified purity, this incompleteness amounts to wholesome desire in the sense of mind wishing to comprehend itself.  

Because of this primordial incompleteness, we only have to be steered in the right direction such that mind goes straight towards Mind instead of away from it.  Accordingly, on this path we will eventually have an intuition of pure Mind that will comport with the teachings of the Buddha and, in addition, be self-verifying and self-evident. 

Another silver lining, is that as mind approaches Mind, the Buddha's teaching becomes clearer which, in turn, leads to even deeper understandings so that we become even closer to Mind than before.  As a consequence, we begin to see the golden thread that unifies all the differences in the teaching of the Buddha and for that matter all religions.  Also, in the daily life that we pursue we naturally gravitate to those practices which make for greater harmony with Mind thus naturally putting aside the inharmonious.  I should emphasize, that there is nothing artificial in this or anything that might lead us to religious hypocrisy or the cult of piety.  As we move closer to Mind, we change from the inside out—not from the outside in which is hypocritical.  

In briefly discussing religious morality, morality should only concern ways of behaving that accord with coming into proximity with pure Mind.  As paradoxical has this might sound, not all morality is capable of helping us to advance to pure Mind.  In fact, much of what we call “morality” isn’t moral at all.  From the perspective of Mahayana Buddhism what deters us from the path to the realization of pure Mind can hardly be counted as moral.  According to the Lankavatara Sutra, it is the simple minded who observe the rules of morality, piety, and penance.