The Zennist: Space-like Mind

The Mahavairocana Tantra or the same, the Mahavairocana Sutra (Yamamoto's translation) provides us with a most interesting look into the important place of 'Mind' (citta) in Mahayana Buddhism a position, I hasten to add, that is sorely neglected in mainstream Buddhist circles.

I gratuitously add that zazen (seated meditation) is taken these days to be the royal road to enlightenment when there is nothing in the canon of Buddhism to suggest that it should. It is the purification of mind that is the real royal road. The rest, including seated meditation, is skillful means to keep children from crying.

Stopping here, I would like to add some excerpts from Yamamoto's translation of the Mahavairocana Sutra about the enlighted Mind (bodhicitta) which, by the way, isn’t the best translation avaliable (that distinction goes to Stephen Hodge).

The Buddha said: “The mind of Enlightenment (bodhicitta) is the cause, the great compassion (mahâkarunâ) is the root, and the expedient (upâya) of deliverance is the ultimate. Oh master of mysteries, what is Enlightenment (bodhi)? That is to know one’s own mind as it really is. Oh master of mysteries, the least part of supreme and right Enlightenment (anuttarâ samyak-sambodhi) cannot be obtained by the intellect. Why is it so? Because the bodhi has no form, oh master of mysteries, the dharmas have no form. Bodhi has the form of space [akasha/aether]” (page 3).

“The mind that has the form of space is away from any discrimination and nondiscrimination. Why is it so? Because the mind has the same nature as space, it is the same as the heart and because space has the same nature as the mind, it is the same as bodhi. In this way, oh master of mysteries, the mind, the space and the bodhi, these three are the same” (page 3).

“Oh master of mysteries, if a man of a good family or a woman of a good family wishes to know bodhi, they should know their own mind. Oh master of mysteries, how can one know one’s own mind? If one looks for the mind in the dharmas that are produced from causes, in colours, in forms, in objective domain, in [such] forms one cannot obtain the mind. If one looks for the mind in impressions, in conceptions, in will, in consciousness, or in the self, in attachment to the self, in the appropriator, in the appropriated thing, in purity, in dhâtu (elements), in âytana (place) and in all the dharmas produced by relative causes, still one cannot obtain the mind” (page 3–4).

The common thread running through these excerpts is that Mind is an empty luminous reality. But perhaps more important, Mind is without dimension which means it exists immaterially and certainly never in spacetime. To exist this way, it only needs to be radiant or the same, animative (prabhâva/tejas) which is also compassion (mahakaruna). By comparison, the worldling cannot imagine living, otherwise, than in a dimensional, material world.

When we take the aforesaid and scale it down to something conceivable for us, our ordinary mind is just like a spacetime cloud in constant change; always informing itself; always existing under its own orders of subject-object duality. But also, this cloud of which we seem to be, is totally oblivious to Mind. And try as we might, we can’t use this cloudy mind to apperceive the radiant space-like Mind. Despite this seeming impossibility, the Buddha teaches us how to do it.