To cover heaven and earth, To distinguish the subtlety, To transcend all conditions of the world, How can you attain this state?— Yun-men (tr., Yi Wu)
Awakening to pure Mind will surely answer Yun-men’s profound question. What else covers heaven and earth except the pure Mind which is universal? To distinguish this subtlety means to see the pure Mind. And what transcends all conditions of the world? Only pure Mind.
But now, what is pure Mind? Have you directly engaged with it? Can you experience its immaterial light pervading your entire being including your thoughts? If not, you will have to look much deeper until you can actualize this Mind. Just reading about pure Mind won’t suffice. Attending ceremonies won’t help either. Putting on robes and sitting on a pillow are worthless activities. They only lead one astray.
And now we come to the real task of Zen. Here we must set aside both heaven and earth. To do so, we can’t be satisfied with just words and phrases, or hours sitting on a pillow all blanked out. We need to come into the presence of this radiant, pure Mind. If we keep our mind empty of preconceptions, it will surely meet us halfway. Only then can the light of pure Mind be ascertained if we make every effort to open ourselves up to its animative power. But how do we open ourselves? Isn’t it by first exhausting all of our presuppositions about this Mind? And strange as it sounds, when all our horizontal roads are blocked or come to naught, a vertical one appears. It is somewhat like looking at an image in a mirror, then seeing the mercury coating upon which the image depends. The horizontal road is the world of images. But upon what do they subsist?
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